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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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