Scriptwriter McLaughlin toils earnestly to pack sex, sensationalism, and B-list names into his follow-up to Glamourpuss (1994): Here, a wide-eyed Hollywood newcomer finds love, work, and a rock star for a best friend. Jason Dallin, fresh from Ohio, is nursing champagne dreams while punching a time clock as a video-store clerk. By an improbable turn of events, he finds himself house-sitting a $10- million Beverly Hills mansion where his neighbors turn out to be his idol, has-been pop star Marina Stetson, and her husband Hank. Jason's fawning adoration and bottomless knowledge of music trivia win over Marina, who's feeling insecure about her comeback album and who inexplicably doesn't seem to have any other friends. By force of will, Jason keeps his lust for Hank secret. But hunky Hank shows up alone one night, and some manly swimming races evolve into graphically rendered poolside groping. Hank, it turns out, has just realized he's gay and is smitten with Jason. Jason, for his part, wakes up to moral qualms but sorts out his loyalties. Then Marina shows up devastated—she's discovered her husband's gayness, though she doesn't know about him and Jason. And Jason, inspired by the trauma of a recent mugging, writes a brilliant video script for one of the songs on her new album—the needed ticket to the job of his dreams. But what will happen if his best friend and music-industry mentor sees the surreptitiously made video (don't ask) of his night of passion with her by-now-estranged husband? Subplots abound. Jason's former roommate, obsessive-compulsive Tricia, for instance, feels she deserves to move up at the talent agency where she's best known for her neatly typed Rolodex cards. Her frustration turns to revenge when her brutish boyfriend (with an agenda of his own?) coaches her on just how to sabotage her unappreciative boss. A good-natured, unapologetically shallow Cinderella story with X-rated interludes.
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1997
ISBN: 0-525-94058-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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