GIRLS ON FILM

In Dean’s second label-laden soap opera and shopping go-round, Anna Cabot Percy, the patrician, beautiful WASP transplant from New York, again crosses swords with Beverly Hills’s A-List girls, the exceedingly wealthy but troubled daughters of Hollywood’s elite show-business moguls, agents, and actors. This time, her deeply loved alcohol- and drug-addicted older sister Susan, recently kicked out of rehab, joins the mix, helping to illuminate Anna’s softer, more vulnerable side. Although she rejected him at the end of the first story, Anna is still deeply attracted to Princeton heartthrob Ben Birnbaum, and her ambivalent feelings toward him, coupled with some student movie-making, drive the rudimentary plot. Straight series pop fiction, this guilty pleasure of a read again offers girls the fun of peeking through a chink in the gated walls of the rich, the beautiful, and the mean. (Fiction. YA)