by Hilary de Vries ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 2004
Time-passing fluff of the most anemic kind.
Gossip! Scandal! Hollywood! A story about all these—yet none of them made exclamation-mark worthy.
De Vries is a veteran career scribbler who, for ten years, has covered the ups and downs of Hollywood for the glossies. She’s a new hand at fiction, however, and her first outing shows it. Her heroine, Alex Davidson, is a senior publicist at DWP, a Hollywood agency that specializes in handling former A-list celebrities fallen on hard times and trying to claw their way back into the spotlight. Alex’s newest acquisition is Troy Madden, a young actor with killer looks, a disarming Midwest attitude, and an insane drug habit (Brad Pitt by way of Robert Downey Jr.) that pretty much wrecked his career. Fresh out of rehab (but not so clean), he’s now Alex’s responsibility. Which is the last thing she needs, as DWP is about to be acquired by a bigger, meaner agency, and she’s not even sure she wants to be in publicity anymore—and that’s a pretty hard pill to get readers to swallow, since for every time Alex yearns to be a member of the East Coast intelligentsia or slams the brutal vacuousness of those in her chosen profession, she makes the very sort of sweepingly shallow generalization readers would expect from a Hollywood stereotype. Buoying Alex in her oh-so-horrid job (which seems to involve making phone calls, drinking lattes, and being nice to selfish movie stars) is the usual wisecracking gay assistant, a stock character swiftly becoming about as welcome as the token black friend in teen film or fiction. There’s the occasional biting observation to show that de Vries has put in real time in the Tinseltown trenches—“Peg is one of the female leviathans Hollywood secretly breeds. . . Tough as nails, most of them could run a small country and none of them are above fucking with you because they can”—but the credit she’s earned gets put to little good use.
Time-passing fluff of the most anemic kind.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6138-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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