Talent

April 14, 2008
Dean (the A-List series) is as of the moment as Us Weekly
when it comes to fashion and celebrity lifestyles. Her devotees will lap up this first installment of her new series, this time about the cutthroat lives of the middle-school set, daughters of Hollywood royalty. The chapters switch between four “rising eighths”—Mac, Becks, Coco and the about-to-be “discovered” Emily from Iowa. The story has zero girl-bonding sweetness and all the backstabbing, social-climbing and girls living life as if they’re adults that genre fans expect and love. There may not be a single redeeming value among these mocktail-drinking characters (with the possible exception of Emily), but with name brand–dropping every other sentence, sometimes in clever prose—“What in the world did Ruby Goldman have up her cropped James Perse sleeve?”—together with super-catty dialogue and gossipy prose, the page-turning becomes compulsive. Ages 12-up.