A Hollywood debut novel complete with celebrities, up-market brand names, and the requisite crazed woman-hating psychosexual serial killer. It's really just a matter of high concept. If you look at Kincaid's smoothly written Tinsel-book as fiction, it's just another in a long line of formula pulp, a little more well-informed than most; but if you see it as a textbook to movie business and pop folklore, it's an effective and sometimes entertaining way to learn. For example, it's much easier to remember that a craft- service girl is the person on a movie set who stocks snacks for the cast and crew if she's one of the serial killer's victims, found tortured and bloody with a bondage mask over her head. It's more attention-getting to discover that erotic scenes are difficult to play when the problem is set forth as the inner monologue of a well-endowed movie star having sex. Kincaid provides detailed lists of what expensive cars to drive and clothes to wear (``Geoffrey Beene's silver sequin slip dress with point d`esprit panels'' and ``high-vamped Diego della Valle hammered gold satin huaraches''). And because all the featured players here bear a plausible resemblance to someone famous, there's the hint that perhaps some of the sordid gossip we're hearing is true. The plot, apart from solving the murders, is about various people involved in the location shooting of a blockbuster film: the beleaguered producer who has to fight to keep his studio from the 300-pound Australian pervert; the superstar actress whose son is one of the stars; the extraordinarily virile six-feet five-inch twins who love the same extraordinarily beautiful supermodel; the bulimic superagent; the ex-porn star, etc. And as background, there's an ongoing soundtrack of plausible name-dropping from some gifted Hollywood observers who can spot cosmetic surgery at a hundred feet. Mindless, approaching camp.
Pub Date: July 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-57566-077-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
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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