YA or STFU

The A-List: Hollywood Royalty: Sunset Boulevard, by Zoey Dean

Dean, Zoey (2009).  Sunset Boulevard (A-List:  Hollywood Royalty).  NY:  Poppy.  304 pages.

As you know, I’m a sucker for a series; therefore, I was super stoked when I finally found the second installment of the “A-List” spin-off series, “A-List:  Hollywood Royalty,” at the library.  Set in the Hollywood/Los Angeles/Beverly Hills of the “A-List” series, “Hollywood Royalty” focuses more closely on a clique of privileged friends and classmates who have connections with the entertainment industry.  The series’ three heroines–Myla, the adopted daughter of a Hollywood super couple (think Brad and Angelina); Jojo, Myla’s recently discovered “sister” and the biological daugther of Myla’s adoptive parents; and Amelie, a teen starlet known for her role on a children’s TV show called “Fairy Princess”–get acquainted formally in this second volume.

The novel begins with the announcement that the male star chosen for the lead in the teen movie Amelie is co-starring in (and filming at Myla’s and Jojo’s high school, Beverly Hills High) has been let go from the project and that the production crew will be auditioning “regular guys” from the BHH student body to play the role.  Of course the role goes to the school nerd-turned-semi-stud, Jake Porter-Goldsmith (coincidentally, Jake’s also Amelie’s math tutor and is nursing a major crush on her), and a star is (sort of) born.  Meanwhile, Myla conspires to get her boyfriend Ash, who caught her kissing another boy in a fit of pique, to reconsider their breakup; Jojo enjoys a brief, albeit short, sisterly relationship with Myla; and Ash finds himself charged with ferrying around rock star client of his record label magnate father’s who has a reputation for excess.

Of course the plot is a little ridiculous:  Dean milks the “star is born” trope for (almost) all it’s worth and peppers the secondary plots with similarly corny cliches (Ash’s dad’s rock star client is only pretending to be rowdy; she’s just a regular girl!  Jojo–like any other fish out of water–just needs a new wardrobe and some lessons in social devastation to succeed in the shark-infested waters of BHH!).  That said, it’s the hackneyed content that you have to love:  these are our fantasies, laid bare and described with a precision and attention to detail that reveals them for the fantasies they are.  While the novels in this series’ attention to the detail of high status and brand name items seems to contribute to the illusion of these same items’ availability to us (the reader), this same description ironically underscores the very differences between our lives and the upper, upper-class lives of the characters.  That is, although the novels familiarize us with the trapping of wealth (and even teach us how to display the same), the particularity of these trappings make bring products’ inaccessibility to the forefront.  For example, instead of suggesting that a character drives a luxurious car (which we might imagine in our own terms), the description of this car as a fully loaded Escalade quantifies “luxurious” for us in a way that increases the distance between us and true luxury.  Pretty major, huh?