30 Sec Lit Crit: The Hollywood Sisters: On Location by Mary Wilcox

ATTENTION CLIQUE CHICKS: an important public service announcement
Hey, those Lisi Harrison novels are ok, but what does girlfriend do when girlfriend has read all seven, and number eight isn't out yet? Check out this review by Leila Roy of Bookshelves of Doom...she'll point girlfriend in the right direction:

I loved the first installment in the Hollywood Sisters series, so I was happy to pick up the second.  (Perfect timing, too -- I really needed a shiny pink book yesterday.)

This time, the cast of Two Sisters (and, of course, Jessica) are -- go figure -- On Location.  They go from Los Angeles to Mexico, from Mexico to Wisconsin.

We've entered into the Formula Fiction zone -- another saboteur, more romantic misunderstandings, another Special Guest Star Disaster, more characters you'll recognize from the gossip pages.  (Paige's mother is CLEARLY Dina Lohan, which I thought was especially hilarious.) 

Formulaic nature aside, it's still an entertaining sequel.  Jessica is still a likable, down-to-earth heroine -- and her narration still brings the laughs:

And poetry--those stacks of little sentences stand by you in tough times.  This is exactly the kind of poetry you need to read as a broken heart:

LOVE - what is love?
A great and aching heart;
Wrung hands; and silence;
and a long despair.
Life - what is life?
Upon a moorland bare
To see love coming and see love depart.

--R.L. Stevenson

See?  Don't you feel worse already?

I've brought a book of poetry for the plane and my summer reading, To Kill a Mockingbird.  That title packs as much sad as a whole poem, I say.

I'll continue handing this series to Clique fans, in the hopes that they'll take to it.  As I said about Backstage Pass, like the Clique, it's mostly clean, it's got the money, the brand names (not as many, thankfully) and the in-fighting, but it's witty and it's not bitchy or gross.  Hooray!