Star Quality: A Novel

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: 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: 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.