A rollicking debut about a cola marketing campaign that takes on Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and corporate America in one perfectly executed triple play. Although publicity and marketing are popularly associated with the advertising mavens of New York, those in the know understand them as peculiarly West Coast enterprises—and our narrator Scat is nothing if not in the know. “Marketing is like LA,” he explains. “It’s like a gorgeous, brainless, model in LA. A gorgeous, brainless model on cocaine having sex drinking Perrier in LA.” In other words: Image beats reality every time. Scat (nÇ Michael George Holloway) has a well-developed taste for sharkmeat, but even he finds himself continually brought up short by the venalities of the trade. Desperate to get a foot in some door or other, he asks his old classmate Sneaky Pete for an introduction to the New Products Manager at Coca-Cola—an old friend of Sneaky Pete’s named 6. 6 [sic] can only spare 30 seconds of face time with Scat, but that’s enough for him to pitch his idea: “New cola product. Black can. Called Fukk” [sic]. 6 falls madly in love with the concept—and Scat falls madly in love with 6 (despite her ice-cold exterior and her self-proclaimed lesbianism)—and the two get right down to the business of throwing together a presentation. Fukk Cola becomes very hot, very quickly, so much so that the idea is stolen even before it’s pitched to the Coca-Cola brass, with the result that 6 loses her job and Scat loses his rights to the concept before it’s a week old. But neither is the sort to say die, and they team up once more to create the most expensive commercial advertisement ever made: a $140-million feature film about Coca-Cola starring Tom Cruise and Gwyneth Paltrow. Can two twentysomething has-beens turn defeat into failure? Can they at least find true love? This is Hollywood, after all. A bit too slick, but funny and fast all the same: about as filling as cotton candy, but just as sweet going down.
Pub Date: July 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88640-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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
BOOK REVIEW
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