Very familiar plot tarted up with skin-tight tracksuits and backwards baseball caps. But the cheekiness and bitchy energy of...
Movie stars get mad—and get even.
Lola Sanchez is the hottest thing in Hollywood—and is insisting on action star Linc Blackwood for her next picture, secretly vowing revenge for his getting her pregnant on a boozy night ten years ago, when she was just plain Lucia Nobody. At 15, she was so innocent—and then he’d walked in to the party . . . “Linc Blackwood! Her favorite movie star! She’d seen all his movies three times. She could hardly believe it!” A subsequent back-alley abortion left her infertile and bitter. But her dopey tennis-god husband Matt Seel doesn’t seem to mind. Hey, Lola’s limo is so big he can practice his backhand in it, and he doesn’t appear to notice that Lola is screwing her former flame Tony Alvarez, a druggin’, thuggin’ lowlife who’s made it big as a director. Lissen up, chica, Lola rules: Forget Linc’s loyal wife, raven-haired, totally talented English actress Shelby Cheney—Lola gives blowjobs that make men loco. But Shelby loves Linc no matter what—and only she knows that he drinks and cheats on account of his abusive father beat his doormat mother to death, then blew his worthless brains out. Okay, then, moving along to Cat Harrison, the 19-year-old ultrahottie writer/director of a breathtakingly hip new movie, married to sensationally sexy, perpetually stoned Aussie rock star Jump. Cat is writing and directing Shelby’s next movie, when not dodging the amorous advances of Nick Logan, the handsome, horny male lead (she fends him off for about five minutes, a record for self-restraint in a Collins heroine). Eventually, Matt, who seems to have fuzzy green tennis balls for brains, figures out what’s going on—and the real shooting begins. Nice girls finish first.
Very familiar plot tarted up with skin-tight tracksuits and backwards baseball caps. But the cheekiness and bitchy energy of Collins’s previous trashy treats just ain’t here—as if written by someone else: uncharacteristically dull.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-1649-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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