Satire doesn't get any broader or easier, but that doesn't mean that the book's not at least fitfully fun.
LA writer Smith is back with another frothy satire (Moist, 2007, etc.).
This time out, the focus is on America's most beloved abs, which belong to Sepp Gregory, a reality TV star who parlayed conspicuous muscle and a broken heart on a show called Sex Cribs into a follow-up series and then glossy-magazine and tabloid celebrity. Now, he's written—or at least is purported to have written—an autobiographical novel called Totally Reality. He's making shirtless appearances in thronged bookstores everywhere but also struggling with a secret case of impotence; it turns out that behind that rock-hard six-pack is a sweet and simple soul who needs to be in love in order to perform. Enter Harriet Post, a ferociously snobby (but, natch, demurely lovely) literary blogger and wannabe novelist who sees, in the blindly ecstatic reception of the novel, all the signs of impending apocalypse. She vows to out the ghostwriter and expose the vapid Sepp. After a scene of steamy four-way farce in the Playboy Mansion's library—a scene featuring Sepp, Harriet, the ghostwriter and the surgically enhanced belle dame sans merci who seduced and then abandoned Sepp on Sex Cribs—there's a terrible accident, and Harriet and Sepp find themselves on the lam in the desert, where what starts as a case of lust threatens to blossom into something more. Smith plays it fast and very, very loose in his sendup of celebrity culture, TV and literary publishing, and a good bit of this is just cheerful porn wearing the scantiest fig leaf of wit.
Satire doesn't get any broader or easier, but that doesn't mean that the book's not at least fitfully fun.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2201-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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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