Rating: 
Summary: Great get away story about drugs, beauty and vanity!
Review: I am embarassed to admit how much I loved this book! It is a fun read about a young girl who is too beautiful and kind for her own good in the wrong town! I carried the book around with me and read it every chance I got! You will see that sometimes not getting what you want is a good thing!
Rating: 
Summary: Better Ending
Review: I loved the book and also the movie (the book was better). I just don't like the way it ended. It could have had a lot better ending than it did.
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Summary: Dolls for Grown-up
Review: Since its first print in the 60's, "Valley of the Dolls" has caused furor wherever it is. It surely has it admirers and its haters -- and it is not a surprise due to its explosive, realistic and trashy material. Jacqueline Susann's novel tells the story of three wannabe stars through a period of 20 years. So there are up and downs in their careers and personal lives. And when I say up I really mean the highest up possible, and down... well, their down is the lowest possible: in the 'valley of the dolls'. Jackie wrote as who knew the cause. She herself was a starlet in Broadway in the 50's and did some TV later, but she never made the stardom until she became a writer. And fame was all she wanted all the time. She could tell all the excentricities and disfunctions of stars because she lived with it for years. In front of the public: the glamour; in the backstage: fights, arguing, drugs and a lot of sex. The characters are quite interesting and intruguish in this novel. The trio of protagonists, Anne, Neely and Jennifer are the best developed ones, but the supporting ones are very believable too. It is impossible to deny that Jacqueline knew the female soul very good, so her women are much more active and alive than her men. All three girls pass through a self discovery journey whose results are not good, and become addicted to pills-- a.k.a. dolls, hence the title. Despite the subject, it is not a serious or depressive book. You will find yourself laughing out loud in some moments -- even though Jackie's intention wasn't to make you laugh. Another interesting point in the novel is that it traces a realistic painel of the show biz in the 40's, 50's and 60's. The novel brings up themes like the rise and fall of the studio system, the 3 picture deals, the substituition of the radio and cinema by the TV, the adaptation of the actors face the new media. This kind of things is between the lines sometimes, but sometimes it is very explicit. I highly recommend this novel to everyone who wants to have some fun and read about a crazy time. All in all, "Valley of the Dolls" may not be a great piece of literature, but it is a great piece of escapism; and sometimes, that is more than enough.
Rating:
Summary: The BEST novel I've read to this day !
Review: My mother read this book and loved it in the '60s and I read it and loved it in 2000's. It's been almost a year since I read this novel and it still stays fresh in my mind. The characters, Anne, Neely, and Jennifer felt like good friends and I could understand the pain, anguish, desire, and greed that they all felt. The emotions that Susann draws upon so exquisitly pulled me through the ups and downs of each character. Neely, Anne, and Jennifer each have traits that anyone could relate to and seem so real that it's almost shocking that they are fictional. The trust, lust, love and betrayal keep the reader enthralled as very important underlying themes run rampant through this novel. The 1940s and '50s glamour that we all see on the outside is dissected in this novel, and the reader can see the dark underside of a never-ending struggle to the nonexistent top. And do Anne, Neely, and Jennifer deserve the harsh punishments they each recieve when they eventually hit the bottom, the Valley of the Dolls? I recommend this novel above all others for a reader of any generation - it is truly a classic.
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Summary: Is it a "Classic"?...HELL YES!
Review: OK, you've got to remember it came out in the 60's, so what was shocking then is probably laughable today. And I'll not only 'date' myself here, but I may insult my own intelliegence! However, the fact is, this was one of only two books (the other being "The Carpetbaggers") that I stayed up all night reading from cover to cover. I could put down and return later to "The Great Gatsby" or "The Winter of Our Discontent" or "So Big" or "Appointment in Samarra," but not Jackie Susann's masterful creation! I guess I'm just a push-over for the roman a' clef genre, and while "Carpetbaggers" gave me an inside look (I assumed) at the lives of Howard Hughes and Jean Harlow and Jane Russell, "Valley of the Dolls" was even more obvious in presenting the "real" Judy Garland via the character Neely O'Hara. And we all knew that Judy had been involved in an affair with one of her agents, and since one of them was Freddie Fields, who happened to be married to Polly Bergen, then was the classic beauty Anne Welles actually Polly? Was sexy Jennifer North fashioned after Marilyn Monroe? Well, obviously, tough-as-nails Broadway star Ethel Merman was the inspiration for the indomitable Helen Lawson character. And on and on it went, reading something into every line, and between a few others! It was fun, it was entertaining, it was a little mesmerizing....and how better to define a "classic." It got even better when they made the movie......hiring Patty Duke to play Garland, and then hiring Garland herself to play Ethel Merman...err...Helen Lawson. Then firing poor Judy, 'cause she was still having more pill problems than even Neely O'Hara was supposed to have...bringing in Susan Hayward to replace her...putting tragic Sharon Tate in the tragic Marilyn Monroe part...it just got a little confusing and a little (or a lot!) campy, but I'll tell you what....I still remember staying up all night to read the book when it first came out. I wonder if anyone would still be that intrigued with the inside-show-biz "scoop" today. Somehow, I hope so.
Rating: 
Summary: This book is so bad, it gave me dry heaves
Review: All the reviews in this book are a lie! The gormless individuals who liked this book are unassuming maladroits! This book was so boring and juvenile (PG 13ish), I was surprised they said it was shocking! I feel bad that I even finished this book, and because of it, I'm taking shock therapy!DO NOT READ THIS NOVEL
Rating:
Summary: Valley of the Dolls
Review: I thought that this book was amazing. I couldn't put it down and that is a lot coming from someone who has a hard time focusing on a book and then actually finishing it. It was much like a soap opera and I don't watch trash like that (except for good ol' Melrose Place). When I would read the book I would find myself gasping out loud or saying, "I can't believe she did that!" or "That jerk!" ...
Rating:
Summary: You Can't Beat It With A Stick
Review: VALLEY OF THE DOLLS was old news by the time I got around to it in the late 1970s. Even though I was then in my late teens my ultra-respectable mother disapproved of me reading it--but one day, when I left the book open on the coffee table, I came in to find my mother engrossed in it and she wouldn't give it back until she had read it cover to cover. From time to time I asked what she thought about it. "VULGAR TRASH!" she would say. She read every word. You couldn't have beaten her off that book with a stick! Now, some reviewers try to attach high-flown interpretations to this novel, and some of those intrepretations may even have a little validity. But the real reason any one reads VALLEY OF THE DOLLS is because it really IS vulgar trash--and even now, more than thirty years later and although there are much more explicit novels available, VALLEY OF THE DOLLS remains the BEST vulgar-trash-novel going. Jacqueline Susann wasn't much of a writer but she was a born storyteller, and her heavy-handed style suits this story of three lovely young women who hit post-WWII New York with innocent dreams and ambitions--only to become victims of a meat-grinder entertainment industry, too much sleeping around with the wrong men, and pill-popping hell. In the process, Susann unexpectedly creates a surprisingly effective social document of the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s--a period in which women's roles underwent a profound change. Susann, who knew the New York entertainment scene inside out, based many of her characters on real people (does any one out there NOT know that Neely O'Hara is based on Judy Garland and Helen Lawson based on Ethel Merman?), and that makes the novel even more fun to read. But you don't have to play guessing games to enjoy the book: VALLEY OF THE DOLLS is loud, brash, common, brazen, vulgar trash that you simply cannot put down. Over the passing years I've read it at least three times. And my mother read it twice!
Rating:
Summary: A Classic!!!
Review: While VOTD is hardly a piece of american literature that we would've read or learned about in high school, it definitely has it's place in the history of fiction.
Jackie Susann was a writer that wrote with great guts and integrity, and she had a great style. The Dialogue just flows so well! and the characters all spring to life. Even those characters we don't necessarily like are just as intriguing to read as say, Anne Welles. Anne is a small town girl who moves to the big city, New York to be exact. She is kind, bright, and sweet, maybe too sweet and kind for her own good. She wants a better and more exciting life.
Down the path to that life, she meets Neely O'Hara, a struggling actress/singer/dancer who wants to make it on Broadway and will stop at nothing to reach success. This character is hard to sympathize with, whereas Anne is totally easy to like and feel sorry for.
Enter Jennifer North, She is an actress that meets up with Neely and Anne as they all learn about and see the lights go up on Broadway. Jennifer is more like Anne's personality, but has a very tough time between her family, the man she loves, Tony Polar, and his family.
They all become friends, and all shall i say? creep around in the valley of the dolls. "Dolls" being sleeping pills, pep pills, pills to help them relax... Read and see what these dolls do to their lives and the lives of those around them.
This is a MUST READ book. I can't say enough good things about it, it is captivating, easy to follow, it has great dialogue. If you like stories about women friendships and stories about show business, this should interest you. I have read this twice in the past six years, and I love it just as much now as I did when I was 26 yrs. old. It's a timeless read.
Rating:
Summary: Campy, but still entertaining
Review: I love the book, I love the movie. It's got everything a soap opera needs to make a great story.
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