By: Wendy Holden
Sourcebooks Landmark
1 Heart Review from Guest Reviewer Lisa
Darcy’s a struggling English rose actress when The Call comes from L.A. An Oscar-tastic director. A movie to make her famous. The hunkiest costar in Hollywood. So why doesn’t she want to go?
Belle’s a size-zero film star but she’s in big, fat trouble. Hotter than earth’s core a year ago, she’s now Tinseltown toast after her last film bombed. Can she get back to the big time?
Emma’s a down-to-earth, down-on-her-luck nanny trying to weather London’s cutthroat childcare scene and celebrity mom whirlwinds. What will it take for her to get back in control of her own life?
Jet to London, Hollywood and Italy; toss in a passionate star chef, a kind-hearted, disillusioned paparazzo, and a reluctant male supermodel and find [author] Wendy Holden at her best.
This back-cover description pretty much covers it all. The story doesn’t go much deeper than this and you can probably guess the answers to those questions.
Holden weaves a story in which each of her many characters cross-paths and get unexpectedly involved in each others lives’. The problem is there is nothing unexpected about the plot for the reader. It’s highly clichéd and full of stereotyped characters.
There is Orlando, the teenager who was once awkward and pimply, but almost overnight turns into the hottest guy at his school. The popular girls want to get at him, but so does a talent scout for a modeling agency who thinks she’s found the next big “face”. Along with Emma and Darcy, he is one of the “pure” souls who get sucked into the lives of the beautiful people.
In contrast, we meet Belle, the silicone-enhanced Hollywood starlet, and Christian, the actor trying to climb to the top one bed at a time. These two will do anything in their pursuit of fame and fortune. Predictably (to the fictional world in which she lives and to the reader), Belle even finds herself adopting an African orphan to get back in the headlines.
There are too many other characters to introduce in this review. I got the feeling that even the author had trouble managing her cast. The character we meet in the first chapter disappears almost entirely until the middle of the book. That’s about where I stopped reading. Up to that point the characters and plot were so empty I didn’t care to find out what happens to them next. Don’t waste your time with this one.
