True Confessions of a Hollywood Starlet by Lola Douglas

June 4th, 2008 at 2:40pm |

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Audience: Middle School

Rating: B+

Synopsis:

Morgan Carter is a Hollywood IT girl – making 3 million a movie and partying every night with fabulous famous friends. Or at least she was, until she almost overdoses outside of a nightclub one night. Now no one wants to work with her. Her manager and mother conspire to send her off to the middle of nowhere for a year – enrolling her in high school and telling her to lay low. If Morgan can survive the year and reappear sober and with a tell-all diary, she’ll be able to rebuild her career. Unfortunately, that’s a really big IF.

Chatter:

(Spoiler Alerts! ) I’ll admit it – I picked up this book thinking it was going to be completely fluffy – a la ‘Gossip Girl.’ Even the cover boasts that “this is the book to pick up while you’re waiting for the next Princess Diaries installment.” But it looked fun and the cover was sparkly – so I thought, what the heck. This was a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming that this book is To Kill a Mockingbird or Great Literature, but it was more than the puff piece I’d expected.

I was glad that Douglas included Morgan’s struggles to stay sober, her trips to NA, and her inability to sleep at night – these things gave the book more credibility and took a bit of the glamour off of her Hollywood life. When Marissa came to visit, the initial awkwardness and then the temptations were realistic. I could see how easily Morgan would be swept up in what had been her old life and give in to offers of luxury and shopping.

If anything, the least realistic part of the book is how easily Morgan adjusted to the structure and schedule of high school. Debbie is a bit over written as well. It seems like if Morgan had just set her up with anyone she would have been satisfied. I don’t think it’s necessarily Eli that Debbie wants, it’s just that he was nice to her. Debbie was a completely different person to Morgan during the short time that Morgan was being nice and trying to help her- I could have seen her being the biggest suck up, not the one to take Morgan down.

I’ll read the sequel, More Confessions of a Hollywood Starlet, but I hope it’s not formulaic (in the Eli can’t deal with the fame and Morgan gets caught up in wanting revenge against Debbie vein). I guess I’ll have to wait and see.