Cheap thrills, but in hardcover, not nearly cheap enough.
Actress Rinna’s debut features an unscrupulous Hollywood diva who will stop at nothing to defeat a younger rival.
Tally, Sadie and Mandy, three ingénues who came to L.A. hoping to break into acting, are still waitressing despite years of lessons with a tyrannical acting coach. As they serve champagne and mini-cheeseburgers at the Vanity Fair after-party one Oscar night, little do the gal pals know what destiny has in store. Tally’s exotic beauty, talent and sheer niceness net her a part on primetime soap Dana Point, after its erstwhile star, Susie, weaseled out of her TV contract to star in a movie. Sadie talks her way into a job as assistant to ICA super-agent Josh, while Mandy gets a boob job and quickly rises to the heights of porn stardom. Things are going swimmingly for Tally until Susie (a onetime call girl and perennial nymphomaniac) is fired from the movie for, among many other transgressions, unspeakable acts with a camel! Blackmailing the producer, she returns to Dana Point, where she’s intent on smothering Tally’s career in its cradle. Susie’s gossip mill, cranked tirelessly by her network of hairdressers and other sycophants, dishes vicious innuendo about Tally’s moral character to the tabloids. And Tally isn’t doing herself any favors by her inability to resist the attentions of the latest ER-clone lothario doc, Gabriel, when she knows he’s only using her for sex and paparazzi bait. When Tally meets indy producer Mac, who taps her for his latest art-house masterpiece shooting in Paris, it’s true love, the path of which is strewn with plot complications, all hinging on the stupidity of the major players. No one sees through Susie until it’s too late. Mac, for a savvy Hollywood sophisticate, is particularly gullible—he marries the superannuated harpy. The usual clichés abound: name- and brand-dropping, regular intervals of kinky sex and superficial characterizations.
Cheap thrills, but in hardcover, not nearly cheap enough.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7761-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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
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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