Last Night at the Hollywood Canteen takes us back to the height of World War II, with a mystery that intrigues and gives the reader fun characters to play with, but doesn’t really excite. It’s a pretty decent portrait of World War II-era Hollywood, but the mystery needed more punch to satisfy me. After the…
All I knew about Kacen Callender’s Stars in Your Eyes when I picked it up for review was that it’s a celebrity fake-dating romance between a troubled bad-boy actor and his more likeable, sunny-natured co-star. Having enjoyed Ava Wilder’s How to Fake it in Hollywood – a deeply emotional, character-driven romance featuring complex, flawed but…
It Happened One Fight is just the sort of snappy screwball romantic comedy that the romance world has been waiting for. It pays a fine tribute to the 1930s romantic comedies it’s clearly based upon, and provides the reader with one heck of a rollicking ride. Joan Davis and Dashiell (Dash) Howard make beautiful music…
Have you missed Jackie Collins, but aren’t keen on her sexual content? Because Karin Tanabe seems to be channeling her to a degree – cutting her heady blend of sex, drugs and celebrity with a wry and witty Eve Babitzian/Marvelous Mrs. Maisel tone – with The Sunset Crowd. It’s the story of three women grappling…
Reel is the first in Kennedy Ryan’s Hollywood Renaissance series featuring Black creatives. Director Canon Holt’s six-month search for the woman to star in his biopic of a forgotten Black musical legend comes to an end when he sees Neevah Saint take the stage as a Broadway understudy. He doesn’t care that she’s an unknown,…
How to Fake It in Hollywood is an age-gap, fake-relationship contemporary romance début that delivers a Real Deal Romance packed into a slightly uneven story. Grey Books (real name Emily) is a child actor-turned-teen TV star (think One Tree Hill) of moderate fame. At twenty-seven, after almost twenty years of work, she’s ready to reach…
Birds of California is one of the better post-#MeToo showbiz-kids –grow-up-in-Hollywood novels. Warm and inviting,with engaging characters who are enjoyable, it gets slightly dinged for pacing issues. Fiona St. James was once the child star on the family dramedy The Birds of California, which combined the joys of ornithology with various issues surrounding growing up. …
Meg Tilly does such a good job of the world-building in her tales of romantic suspense that reading her books always tends to be a treat. The Runaway Heiress is a little more fun than her more slice-of-life Solace Island series – which I already liked (and to which this book is lightly tied) –…
Find Me in Havana is a difficult book to grade. Startling, original, frank and powerful, it spellbinds and breaks a reader’s heart. The book tells the tale of Estelita Rodriguez, a Cuban actress whose time in the spotlight led to a supporting role in Rio Bravo and a series of Roy Rogers films. Estelita had…
Grace Turner – née Hyde – had it all; or so it seemed. A Hollywood starlet on the eve of a breakthrough into the serious acting world, she was plucked from England via a stroke of luck at the age of thirteen. In acting, she found a way to snag the attention of her parents…
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