Star Quality

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable popular genre romp
Review: A number of the reviews below have been very critical of this novel and of Joan Collins's writing abilities. First things first: JC can write very well and very wittily - read her entertaining, thrice-yearly diary pieces in UK magazine "The Spectatator" and her wonderfully enjoyable second volume of autobiography "Second Act" if you need proof of that.

Secondly, let's just keep in mind that "Star Quality" is not meant to be anything more than it is: popular fiction. We all need "no-brainer" books sometimes.

Yes, the story is fairly predictable (although I would never have predicted the lesbian angle - credit where it's due people!), and, yes, the whole thing does read a little like a treatment for a glossy miniseries, and, yes, there are a few gaping holes (I would have thought specific details given early in the book about a birth certificate could have prevented a later development involving incest, for example), but all the same the book is diverting, enjoyable fun and I think that is all it is was meant to be.

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable popular genre romp
Review: A number of the reviews below have been very critical of this novel and of Joan Collins's writing abilities. First things first: JC can write very well and very wittily - read her entertaining, thrice-yearly diary pieces in UK magazine "The Spectatator" and her wonderfully enjoyable second volume of autobiography "Second Act" if you need proof of that.

Secondly, let's just keep in mind that "Star Quality" is not meant to be anything more than it is: popular fiction. We all need "no-brainer" books sometimes.

Yes, the story is fairly predictable (although I would never have predicted the lesbian angle - credit where it's due people!), and, yes, the whole thing does read a little like a treatment for a glossy miniseries, and, yes, there are a few gaping holes (I would have thought specific details given early in the book about a birth certificate could have prevented a later development involving incest, for example), but all the same the book is diverting, enjoyable fun and I think that is all it is was meant to be.

Rating:
Summary: Dynasty star should stick to acting
Review: I am a huge Joan Collins fan, all the way back to her Dynasty days. However Star Quality was boring, and predictable. Joan should stick to acting, her sister though, Jackie Collins is a great author check her out.

Rating:
Summary: Lack of Star Quality
Review: I read this book hoping that it would be a wonderful generational saga like Barbara Taylor Bradford's books or Judith Krantz or even her sister's books, full of juicy details of the roaring twenties, theatre and Hollywood in it's heyday. What I got instead was the literary equivalent of gruel.

How is it possible for Joan Collins, a British subject, not to know that the daughter of a Duke, is styled a Lady not an Honorable? Or that Bugsy Siegal didn't start building his hotel in Vegas till the late forties?

This book was full of cliche's, thin characterization, and bad dialogue. The purported villainess of the piece spends most of the book unseen, only to pop up occasionally like the proverbial bad penny. If this book had come over the transom without a famous name attached, it would not even have published.

Ms. Collins would do well to stick to what she knows.

Rating:
Summary: BUT, THERE IS THAT VOICE!
Review: It's that voice, the soft dulcet tones that can frame a threat as easily as an endearment. It's the voice that drove Blake Carrington to distraction on TV's "Dynasty." No one could read the words of Joan Collins as truly as the actress herself, and so she does.

Granted, those words are a bit of fluff, but who doesn't need ear candy once in a while?

Gorgeous and red-headed, Millie McClancey is the product of famine ravaged Ireland. She's poor but star struck, and she makes it big on the stage. As a matter of fact, she's the first of four generations to do so. Following in their turn are her daughter, Vickie, and later her granddaughter, Lulu.

Each, of course, leads a tumultuous life fraught with love and danger. "Star Quality spans the generations from early 20th century London to Broadway today, while Collins spices the years with sex, secrets and success.

Predictable? Yes.

But, there is that voice.

Rating:
Summary: BUT, THERE IS THAT VOICE!
Review: It's that voice, the soft dulcet tones that can frame a threat as easily as an endearment. It's the voice that drove Blake Carrington to distraction on TV's "Dynasty." No one could read the words of Joan Collins as truly as the actress herself, and so she does.

Granted, those words are a bit of fluff, but who doesn't need ear candy once in a while?

Gorgeous and red-headed, Millie McClancey is the product of famine ravaged Ireland. She's poor but star struck, and she makes it big on the stage. As a matter of fact, she's the first of four generations to do so. Following in their turn are her daughter, Vickie, and later her granddaughter, Lulu.

Each, of course, leads a tumultuous life fraught with love and danger. "Star Quality spans the generations from early 20th century London to Broadway today, while Collins spices the years with sex, secrets and success.

Predictable? Yes.

But, there is that voice.

- Gail Cooke

Rating:
Summary: A Beach Book
Review: OK, so, as one reviewer said, this is a no-brainer book and we need that sometimes.
Predictable...yes, but this book has enough twists and turns and even an occasional surprise to actually make you want to continue to the next chapter to see "What happens next?"
As I titled it, "A Beach Book," a book to enjoy along with the sand and surf.

Rating:
Summary: ZERO ORIGINALITY
Review: She starts off by taking her sister's idea of writing about back scenes HOLLYWOOD, which Jackie wore out years ago. She writes of this Irish peasant girl from the perspective of British aristocracy and never rolls up her sleeves to bring to life the hard scrabble world of the character, so Molly is little better than a stick figure. You'll immediately recognize that these characters are the facsimile of the Barrymore Family. The plot is never developed and is told like some High Tea tome. Ms. Collins uses every cliche of the last century and her parallels reveal her keen lack of awareness of the human condition. She needs to learn as her sister did that British euphimisms don't play well in American literature unless they are made within quotation marks and used to season a particular character. It reads like some drama queen reading a script and in no way resembles a novel. The regal demeanor of the book is self serving posturing and is not designed to enlighten or entertain, but to impress---which it didn't.

Rating:
Summary: a juicy, daring story
Review: The saga of four women whose lives span the 20th century, all of them finding their passion in the performing arts. From stagestruck Millie of World War I to her award-winning great-granddaughter today, we follow these boisterous, enduring & ambitious women - through fame & fortune on London & New York stages, to Hollywood, to careers in singing, theater & film. Through passionate love affairs, disastrous marriages & lifetime enmities.

Racing through the decades, each a time capsule of fashion & news, swirls through the world of celebrities & accomplishments. As an enduring celebrity herself, Joan Collins knows from whence she writes!

STAR QUALITY is a galloping, breathless adventure, recommended for everywoman who loves a juicy, gossipy, daring story, sketched with a broad brush, sometimes hilarious language, & those daily life details as cultures change, relationships grow & die, that fascinate fans of historical romance.

Rating:
Summary: It's nearly terrible...damned with faint praise
Review: Well, I started reading it yesterday, along with my buddies at Readerville.com, and quickly realized I needed a notepad next to me while I turned the pages.

Notes:

p. 19: When were fishnet tights invented?

p. 20: Could Millie really escape to the theather on a daily basis because the rest of the staff was too busy to monitor her chores? Clearly Joan Collins has never had a job.

p. 30: Shall we guess who? "In the passage outside, someone else who had heard everything crept away shaking with rage." Well, who's the only character we're already supposed to dislike? Who sneered at the three-toed man?

p. 38: I actually think this sentence is excellent: "She didn't even feel the need to breathe. she just drew her breath from him now and again." Yow.

p. 55: A TINY STAB OF PAIN?!?!?!

The book is suffering from too many adverbs.

p. 72: Now it's getting incredible. A humanitarian bachelor with a dorm for performers? I loved this bit: "...a pretty ballerina would pirouette as a boy played the harmonica."

It's like a bad Thomas Kinkade painting, the one with the lighthouse situated, "unhelpfully," in a forest.

p. 75: I await one original phrase.

p. 76: She uses the word "chockablock."

p. 77-78: History lesson time. "So many husbands and fathers had been killed in the war, thousands of women, young and old, were left with no means of support." Breathtakingly unoriginal-just one in an endless parade of sentences crippled with clichés.

p. 81: "Millie, picking up a pair of large scissors , began to chop off her long red hair into a fashionable bob." Well, that I wanna see. Everyone I know who ever impulsively took a pair of scissors to their hair wound up in the Shame Ward at the hospital.

p. 83: "...determined to live her life to the full."

I'm always so happy when people do that, and when nice writers tell us they're doing that.

And my final observation, now that I've gotten to Chapter 9, is that it's so sweet that Joan Collins was alive for the whole thing. So at least we know it's historically accurate.

This book is so cliché-ridden, it feels like it's already been chewed for you. The only people who should buy this book are those so obsessed with celebrity that they have no other meaning in life. Or do what I did: take notes and laugh, laugh, laugh. Just as Joan Collins is...all the way to the bank!