LoveSpell, $5.99, ISBN 0-505-52483-X
Contemporary Romance, 2002
That’s it. I’m calling for a ban of all Hollywood romance stories. Who’s with me? Even if I have to be the sole voice of reason, I’m calling for an outright blanket ban. I don’t trust romance authors to do a decent Hollywood romance anymore. The collision of Hollywood and Romance Novel Land is like the mating of two grotesque gargoyles, and the resulting progeny is a brain-me-until-I’m-dead humorless cokehead case of kids and women behaving badly.
Indeed, like every other romance novel featuring Hollywood heroes, the heroine is the ordinary fame-free good woman who will show our Hollywood hero the true meaning of life, as fame isn’t everything. (But our heroine still retains access to the hero’s millions, of course.) She is not like those supermodel bitches he usually consorts with (Hockey or Haddock or whatever the heroine’s name is has only slept with her jerk husband Jim – yes, that’s a sign of “purity”, people), because we all know that while men can’t do wrong, in Hollywood or in Tahiti, beautiful women with careers and fame are all sluts, useless mothers, and we should just kill them all so that they will never corrupt our helpless millionaire movie star actors any more.
Hollywood superstar, Treet Miller – okay, cut. Cut, cut, cut. Treet Miller? Seriously, is this guy’s agent braindead? You don’t have a name like Treet and still have a career in Hollywood, unless we are talking about career as the bottom in Hot All-Male College Kids Gangbang Volume XXX here.
Anyway, he and our ordinary Plain Jane, Hadleigh Charmaine – okay, cut. CUT.
Hadleigh Charmaine? What happened to names like William and Jessica or something that I can at least pronounce without wincing?
Anyway, their kids are switched. Hadleigh has a deadbeat husband – in Romance Novel Land, businessmen are the male counterparts of female actresses and supermodels – while Treet’s supermodel girlie doesn’t care (you’d think a supermodel will know how to use birth control, oops, sorry, birth control doesn’t exist in romance novel land except as leaky plot devices), but these two care. Their kids become best friends, sort of like the Olsen twins, and now Mommy and Daddy must love each other. They must.
Those Baby Blues then faithfully moves to a ranch – there’s always a ranch in these Hollywood romances; I don’t know why, it must be somewhere in the contract they signed with their publisher – where our heroine yells, pouts, stomps, and acts like a PMS monster gone berserk. I don’t know why Hadleigh’s like that, but if my name sounds like one of those Polish black market pills for constipation, I’ll have lots of issues too. Treet is appropriately dumb and horny, the two kids are horrible gnats, and oh yeah, the Evil Supermodel tries to come between them.
There’s something unsavory about these Let’s-Go-Hollywood romance novels with their double standard hypocrisy about fame and money. Ultimately the women of Hollywood are the whores, while the womanizing hunks are prime catches. These stories seem to feed on resentment one believes fanatic readers of tabloids must feel towards twiggy actresses, while painting a ridiculously unrealistic portrayal of how Hollywood works.
In the meantime, this book with its pathetic attempts at being cute and precious can go jump the shark and die. Or not. I’m too stupefied to care either way.
