Shopaholic to the Stars

Becky Brandon (née Bloomwood) has stars in her eyes. She and her daughter, Minnie, have joined husband Luke in LA—city of herbal smoothies, multimillion-dollar yoga retreats, and the lure of celebrity.

Luke is there to help manage the career of famous actress Sage Seymour—and Becky is convinced she is destined to be Sage’s personal stylist, and go from there to every A-list celebrity in Hollywood!

But things become complicated when Becky joins the team of Sage’s archrival.

How will charming and supportive Luke deal with this conflict? Is it possible that what Becky wants most will end up hurting those she loves most? Shopaholic fans old and new will devour Sophie Kinsella’s newest adventure!

~ Synopsis from goodreads

Just a couple of weeks ago, I and other bloggers had ranted about the lack of closure in books and cliff-hanger style endings in series books. At that time, I wasn’t thinking about this book, but now after reading Shopaholic to the Stars, I realize this is the perfect example of what I was talking about.

Here is a book in a series (the 7th in the Shopaholic series), where most of the books can be read as standalone books, or at least have a logical ending to that particular story, but here the ending is such a non-ending, I don’t have the words to describe it. The book is 480 pages, which means it’s quite long compared to the average chick-lit book, and long enough to finish up the plot points in the book.

The book has basically two plot points – the regular Becky fiasco where she tries to kick-start her career as a stylist in Hollywood, with predictably funny results, and a secondary plot point involving her friends Suze and Tarquin, her dad, and a possible mystery. Truthfully, this is the interesting plot point and I really wanted to know where that story-line was going, and to my disappointment, that’s the one that fizzles out with the cliff-hanger.

I might have tolerated the cliff-hanger if the rest of the book was better, but I waded through almost 300 pages of blah and just when the book was getting good, it stopped, and stopped so very abruptly. I mean, I was actually turning the page of the book for the next chapter, and was faced with the end of the book, that’s how abrupt the book was.

Sigh! I don’t know what else to say. The positive points of the book are that the male lead Luke is as dreamy and nice as ever, and he just lights up all the parts of the book that he’s in – there are some lovely touching moments with his mother and then finally with Becky at the end of the book. Becky’s friends Suze and Tarquin are people I normally like, but I can’t put my finger on where things go wrong in this particular book. Both of them are annoying and spaced out in turns, and yet, there is something going on there, and I wish Kinsella had paid a little more attention to that, instead of paying attention to the brain-dead main plot, which isn’t terribly original or interesting. Huge elements in this story-line are taken from Hollywood tabloids, and these sections of the story read almost like a tabloid themselves.

Overall, I thought it was a disappointing book and one of the duds in this series. I will still be reading the next book just to know how it all ends, and I really hope that Kinsella wraps up this series with her next book. It is just becoming a travesty at this point, and continuing it is doing more harm than good to this series.

Huge thanks to Penguin Random House for sending me this book for review consideration.

You can also purchase a copy of this book from Amazon