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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
