Book review: Spoiled by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

Amazon: Sixteen-year-old Molly Dix has just discovered that her biological father is Brick Berlin, world-famous movie star and red-carpet regular. Intrigued (and a little) terrified by her Hollywood lineage, Molly moves to Los Angeles and plunges headfirst into the deep of Beverly Hills celebrity life. Just as Molly thinks her life couldn’t get any stranger, she meets Brooke Berlin, her gorgeous, spoiled half sister, who welcomes Molly to la-la land with a smothering dose “sisterly love”…but in this town, nothing is ever what it seems. 
 
This was a snappy, short read, and good fun. A devotee of GoFugYourself, I had wanted to pick this one up for awhile, and it was pretty much what I expected — chock full of witty one-liners and good-natured jabs at celebrity culture. I think, though, I was hoping for a bit more. GoFugYourself is, of course, ultimately just about making fun of celebrities’ horrible outfits, but the writing itself is intelligent and clever. The Fug Girls’ voice in Spoiled definitely comes through clearly, but the novel never quite rises above its shallow premise the way that GFY does.

As I said earlier, the Girls’ trademarks are there: hilarious commentary on outfits and witty pop-culture references, snarky take-downs of gross Hollywood caricatures, and quotable one-liners make this overall a very quick and entertaining read. Part of the reason it reads so quickly, though, is because we race through the plot without much description of the scenery, which may not seem important in a book like this, but to me it stuck out. I’ve read in interviews that the Girls really wanted this to be an “Only in LA” type story, and that they wanted to use their experiences and lives in LA to influence the setting. Despite this, other than throwaway references to the sunshine and obvious Hollywood stereotyping, LA wasn’t really that much of a character.

Taking a bit more time with setting the scene and improving the character depth a bit more could have really added some meat to the story, and I’m really not talking about trying to transform a beach read into War and Peace. I think you’d see what I mean if you read it. It’s fast and funny, moreso than many other entries in this category of summer reads, but it relies on the same stock characters and weak story as we’ve seen before in many other YA chick-lit. I’ll still probably pick up the sequel, because at the end of the day it made me laugh, and that’s not a bad way to spend a few hours!