Royce Rolls - Hardcover

Margaret Stohl is the #1 New York Times best-selling co-author of the Beautiful Creatures series. She is also the author of the instant best-seller Black Widow: Forever Red, and its sequel Black Widow: Red Vengeance, or as noted by one television writer, "those little paper things." (The word you're looking for is books.) Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, Margaret spent her adolescence crank-calling Harrison Ford, living across the hall from a John Waters starlet, and waving to Starline Tours buses as they stopped to take pictures of her P.E. class at Mulholland Hall, where she first met Bentley Royce. These are and are not her stories.

Gr 9 Up—For most of her life, Bentley Royce has been a character on the set of her family's reality TV show. Her every move is calculated, down to daily outfits and breakfast choices. Though her mother, older sister, and younger brother take their scripted lives in stride, Bentley yearns for something more real, including a college education. When ratings begin to slip and renewal of their show becomes uncertain, Bentley starts working on a plan to transform her life. Things quickly get out of control, ending with Bentley and her sister's fiancé reportedly missing after the car they were in is found at the bottom of a ravine the night of the rehearsal dinner. The search for them takes Bentley's family away from their structured schedules and forces them to reevaluate their lives. The author uses the depths to which the actors and network executives will go to maintain fame to make a stark statement about Hollywood culture. While Stohl provides humor and some enjoyable scenes throughout, the narrative becomes weighed down with repetitive reality TV lingo. Production notes and Internet blog posts sprinkled throughout are intriguing but also distract from the plot. VERDICT Some teens may get a kick out of the superficial activities that fill up this book, but others will lose interest quickly. A disappointing read.—Karin Greenberg, Queens College, NY