Perfect Beach Read

Only my great love for the Fug Girls would lead me to pick up a book with this kind of plot, but it’s a love greatly deserved and justified. This book is silly fluff, but it’s fun and I just loved the characters. And who am I to judge, really — I owned all the Clueless book when I was in middle school.

So the first book in the series — Spoiled — is all about Molly, who finds out as her mother is dying that her real father is a famous Hollywood actor named Brick Berlin. So the first book is all culture shock, and finding out where we belong, and learning to get along with Molly’s wretched stepsister, Brooke. The second book hardly features Molly, and instead focuses on wretched sister Brooke, and Molly’s friend Max (also Molly’s boyfriend’s sister).

Brooke, who becomes more and more human throughout the course of Spoiled and continues that trend in Messy, has hired Max to ghostwrite her blog. The blog is ostensibly to increase Brooke’s visibility in Hollywood, with the ultimate goal of landing her a juicy acting role. Truthfully, it’s to make her more visible to her father, who loves her and her sister, but is just barely around. Max, for her part, needs the money so she can pay her way through NYU. The daughter of the school’s headmistress, rather than an actor-producer-director, Max gives us the “normal person’s” view of this world. She also funny and snarky, and the articles she writes on Brooke’s behalf are delightful.

And of course there’s a boy, and a band, and some fighting. But it’s all funny and fun and the Fug Girls maintain their excellent writing style throughout.