Beneath a Starlet Sky

February 28, 2011
Tinseltown princesses Goldberg and Hopper (Celebutantes) are back with another softball skewering of the unbridled egos of fashion, film, and TV reality stars. It's a sweet-natured muddle for much of the hijinks, with enough celebrity name-dropping to make a paparazzo swoon as Lola—a Hollywood blueblood much like her creators—kicks into overdrive as she juggles her latest career as CEO of best-friend Julian Tenant's fashion line, her engagement to dashing doc Lev, her would-be auteur brother's ambitions, her mom's reality TV dreams, her film director dad's conflicted loyalties, and her best friend's breakup. Playing deliciously mean minor roles are magazine cutthroat Coz and rising 16-year-old fashion wunderkind Chili. The noise and celebrity wattage is seductive and silly fun, but the message tucked inside all the gab and glitz is simplicity itself: less acting and more being.

March 15, 2011
Fashionista Lola Santisi is hit with multiple personal and professional crises during a trip to the annual Cannes Film Festival.

Giving up her Los Angeles roots has proved difficult for Lola, the Hollywood princess first introduced in Celebutantes (2009). Now happily residing in New York, she gets to live and work with Julian, her Best Gay Forever (BGF,) as the busy CEO of Julian Tennant Inc., an up-and-coming fashion line. However, Lola's doctor fiancée, Luke "Lev" Levin, is still back in L.A., making a bicoastal existence a necessity. And Lola's famous family needs her attention as well. Her gruff director father Paulie is still making award-winning films, while her former-model mom has found a new calling as a cast member of a "Housewives" style reality show. Her aspiring director brother Christopher is in love with her best friend, Kate, an ambitious CAA agent, who has just dumped him so she could concentrate on her career. And as talented as he is, getting Julian's name out there has proven challenging, making his deep-pocketed backers a bit skittish. But then Lola scores the major coup of having Julian's dresses appear in Baz Luhrmann's latest extravaganza, Four Weddings and a Bris. So they head to the French Riviera for the film's Cannes premier, and a Julian Tennant runway show. The trip coincides with a high-profile magazine cover shoot with the film's leading lady Saffron Sykes and her handsome boyfriend Markus Livingston. But the cover shoot looks increasingly dicey after Saffron and her starlet co-star (and Kate's client) Cricket Curtis get caught in a Sapphic clinch. Then Lev shows up in France and admits, to Lola's horror, that he wants to quit medicine to pursue acting. Throw in a supermodel with anger-management issues; an alcoholic movie star who insists on staying in character as a cross-dressing Columbian drug lord; and an icy magazine editor bent on destruction, and it is a miracle if Lola can walk away with her life, let alone her job. The increasingly absurd plot zips along, but the constant name- and brand-dropping often comes across as more obnoxious than amusing.

Forgettable showbiz spoof.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

December 1, 2010

CEO of Julian Tennant Inc., a fashion line that must make it now or fold, Lola Santisi has turned her back on the acting world but is at the Cannes Film Festival, where she might get a break; one of Tennant's wedding dresses appears in the festival's top film. Will this book do well? Is this a book about the celebrity film world by the authors of the best-selling Celebutantes? Come on.

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2011
The sequel to Celebutantes (2008) finds Lola Santisi, daughter of a famous director and his model-turned-reality-TV-star wife, dividing her time between coasts. In New York, shes hard at work trying to get her friend Julians dresses into the hottest movies and magazines, including the trendsetting Vain, whose villainous creative director is determined to stymie her efforts. Meanwhile her boyfriend, handsome doctor Lev, is working in Cedar Sinais ER in Los Angeles. Lev intends to move to New York as soon as he can land a job at a hospital there. Instead, he scores a gig as a medical consultant on a television show and then winds up in front of the camera, which makes Lola very nervous. The daughters of Hollywood power players, Goldberg and Hopper know the world their story is set in well, and readers will be thoroughly entertained by this scintillating glimpse behind the scenes of the movie and fashion businesses.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)