by Tilly Bagshawe ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2005
Should be one of the summer’s biggest beach books.
Bagshawe goes for the glitz in her big, brash, fantastically enjoyable first novel.
Siena McMahon doesn’t have much in common with the typical chick-lit heroine. She neither stumbles nor bumbles. She craves power, fame and rigorous sex, not chocolate, shoes or another glass of Chardonnay. She doesn’t eke out a living on the fringes of glamour; she was born smack in the middle of it. Her story is also a gossipy saga of the Hollywood dynasty that created her. Bagshawe makes a conscious break from Bridget Jones territory to revisit the glittery domain of Jacqueline Susann, Jackie Collins and Danielle Steel. The results are saucily delicious and utterly absorbing. The story begins in the 1970s, before Siena was born, just as legendary movie star and all-around bad guy Duke McMahon is installing his young mistress in the mansion he shares with his wife and their two children. This unorthodox arrangement leads to scandal, an illegitimate child and a lasting legacy of emotional dysfunction. The only daughter of Duke’s elder son, Siena spends her early years in a tangle of conflicting loyalties, open hatred and savage betrayals. Her estrangement from her family is more or less complete by the time she’s shipped off to an English boarding school. When she returns to Hollywood, she’s a supermodel well on her way to becoming a successful actress, but it will take spectacular tragedy and the love of a good man before she’s truly reconciled to her past and herself. Hot-tempered, oversensitive and ruthlessly ambitious, Siena is not an easy girl to love, but she’s certainly entertaining, and Bagshawe does an excellent job of creating her over-the-top yet believable character. In fact, even the most minor cast members here have well-defined personalities and real motivations. If her predecessors invested the rich and fabulous with epic grandeur, Bagshawe aims to make them accessible—not ordinary, but vividly human.
Should be one of the summer’s biggest beach books.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-57688-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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
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