Star Quality [Large Print] [Hardcover]

Joan Collins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 2002

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 590 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion; Large Print Edition edition (2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0739431366
• ISBN-13: 978-0739431368
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,648,034 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars BUT, THERE IS THAT VOICE!, December 18, 2002

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Star Quality (Audio Cassette)

It's that voice, the soft dulcet tones that can frame a threat as easily as an endearment. It's the voice that drove Blake Carrington to distraction on TV's "Dynasty." No one could read the words of Joan Collins as truly as the actress herself, and so she does.

Granted, those words are a bit of fluff, but who doesn't need ear candy once in a while?

Gorgeous and red-headed, Millie McClancey is the product of famine ravaged Ireland. She's poor but star struck, and she makes it big on the stage. As a matter of fact, she's the first of four generations to do so. Following in their turn are her daughter, Vickie, and later her granddaughter, Lulu.

Each, of course, leads a tumultuous life fraught with love and danger. "Star Quality spans the generations from early 20th century London to Broadway today, while Collins spices the years with sex, secrets and success.

Predictable? Yes.

But, there is that voice.

- Gail Cooke

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars It's nearly terrible...damned with faint praise, December 15, 2002

By 

Tana Butler (Soquel, California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Star Quality: A Novel (Hardcover)

Well, I started reading it yesterday, along with my buddies at Readerville.com, and quickly realized I needed a notepad next to me while I turned the pages.

Notes:

p. 19: When were fishnet tights invented?

p. 20: Could Millie really escape to the theater on a daily basis because the rest of the staff was too busy to monitor her chores? Clearly Joan Collins has never had a job.

p. 30: Shall we guess who? "In the passage outside, someone else who had heard everything crept away shaking with rage." Well, who's the only character we're already supposed to dislike? Who sneered at the three-toed man?

p. 38: I actually think this sentence is excellent: "She didn't even feel the need to breathe. she just drew her breath from him now and again." Yow.

p. 55: A TINY STAB OF PAIN?!?!?!

The book is suffering from too many adverbs.

p. 72: Now it's getting incredible. A humanitarian bachelor with a dorm for performers? I loved this bit: "...a pretty ballerina would pirouette as a boy played the harmonica."

It's like a bad Thomas Kinkade painting, the one with the lighthouse situated, "unhelpfully," in a forest.

p. 75: I await one original phrase.

p. 76: She uses the word "chockablock."

p. 77-78: History lesson time. "So many husbands and fathers had been killed in the war, thousands of women, young and old, were left with no means of support." Breathtakingly unoriginal-just one in an endless parade of sentences crippled with clichés.

p. 81: "Millie, picking up a pair of large scissors , began to chop off her long red hair into a fashionable bob." Well, that I wanna see. Everyone I know who ever impulsively took a pair of scissors to their hair wound up in the Shame Ward at the hospital.

p. 83: "...determined to live her life to the full."

I'm always so happy when people do that, and when nice writers tell us they're doing that.

And my final observation, now that I've gotten to Chapter 9, is that it's so sweet that Joan Collins was alive for the whole thing. So at least we know it's historically accurate.

This book is so cliché-ridden, it feels like it's already been chewed for you. The only people who should buy this book are those so obsessed with celebrity that they have no other meaning in life. Or do what I did: take notes and laugh, laugh, laugh. Just as Joan Collins is...all the way to the bank!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars ZERO ORIGINALITY, January 5, 2003

By 

"little_woman" (Minooka, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Star Quality: A Novel (Hardcover)

She starts off by taking her sister's idea of writing about back scenes HOLLYWOOD, which Jackie wore out years ago. She writes of this Irish peasant girl from the perspective of British aristocracy and never rolls up her sleeves to bring to life the hard scrabble world of the character, so Molly is little better than a stick figure. You'll immediately recognize that these characters are the facsimile of the Barrymore Family. The plot is never developed and is told like some High Tea tome. Ms. Collins uses every cliche of the last century and her parallels reveal her keen lack of awareness of the human condition. She needs to learn as her sister did that British euphimisms don't play well in American literature unless they are made within quotation marks and used to season a particular character. It reads like some drama queen reading a script and in no way resembles a novel. The regal demeanor of the book is self serving posturing and is not designed to enlighten or entertain, but to impress---which it didn't.