Customer Reviews

Star Quality

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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

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!

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.

The saga of four women whose lives span the 20th century, all of them finding their passion in the performing arts. From stagestruck Millie of World War I to her award-winning great-granddaughter today, we follow these boisterous, enduring & ambitious women - through fame & fortune on London & New York stages, to Hollywood, to careers in singing, theater & film. Through passionate love affairs, disastrous marriages & lifetime enmities.

Racing through the decades, each a time capsule of fashion & news, swirls through the world of celebrities & accomplishments. As an enduring celebrity herself, Joan Collins knows from whence she writes!

STAR QUALITY is a galloping, breathless adventure, recommended for everywoman who loves a juicy, gossipy, daring story, sketched with a broad brush, sometimes hilarious language, & those daily life details as cultures change, relationships grow & die, that fascinate fans of historical romance.

I received this book by mistake and thought what the heck, I might as well try it. I am sure glad I did. It has become one of my very favorite books and I have read it at least 8 times over the years and it is still enjoyable everytime. Once you start to read it, it becomes almost impossible to put down. The characters are brilliantly written and they draw you right in to the story with them. Am sure glad I received the wrong book, this book has "Star Quality"!!

I don't know what everyone is complaining about. It's FICTION! The dates don't need to be perfect. I really loved this book, and couldn't put it down. Following the generations of women stars was interesting. The ending is pleasant as well. What can I say? It's a typical Collins novel, but I found that this one did have less sex than usual and a better storyline (which is nice for a change!). Give it a try!

I love books like this, female sagas that span generations, full of intrigue and glamour. While Judith Krantz did it a little better, Joan Collins isn't bad. Our story begins in London near the turn of the 20th century when poor Irish girl Millie McClancey takes a job as a house maid for a rich London family. Millie is quickly caught up in the excitement of the popular dance revues, and soon is practicing songs and routines of her own. One day, Toby Swannell, her employer's son (and an unapologetic womanizer) finds her practicing and encourages her to meet him in private to perform. When another jealous maid finds her out, Millie runs back to Ireland, sure she's going lose her job. She manages to find work in the local pubs doing her singing and dancing routines, until Toby shows up to sweep her off her feet. They get engaged, and Toby finally talks Millie into bed, but he gets cold feet and takes off before they can be married, leaving Millie pregnant. She is not thrilled about it, and things get even tougher when the aunt she's been living with dies and her home is repossessed. With nowhere else to go, Millie returns to London and gets a job in the chorus of a revue, and then moves on to become a big star. Millie is too busy performing to be much of a mother, and does not feel deep maternal love toward her daughter, Vickie, so Vickie grows up with Millie's friend Susie, while Millie advances her career on Broadway. Millie marries a notorious mobster, and they live a glittering life until Millie's death.

The story then shifts to Vickie, who is a bit of a shy wallflower. After her mother's death, her stepfather has her brought to the United States, where she lives quietly in the country until Susie sends photos of her to a Hollywood studio when the search is on to find a Scarlett O'Hara for "Gone With the Wind." Vickie doesn't get the part, but Hollywood likes her looks, and she moves there and builds a career as a movie star during Hollywood's golden age. Vickie has a string of affairs, but never manages to find love, until she meets Sebastian Swannell and gives up her career to be a duchess. The most disappointing part of the book is that Vickie's blood relationship to Sebastian is only handled peripherally. She never figures out he's her half-brother, until the very last part of the book, and then the subject is just dropped. How she managed to miss out on that, as her real father's name was on her birth certificate, bothered me. Anyhow, Vickie's marriage to Sebastian soon hits the skids, and she has another fling with her longtime married lover, Cooper. She and Cooper conceive a child, but since it's a girl, Vickie has no trouble getting out of her marriage to Sebastian. She returns to Hollywood and finally marries Cooper, and they settle down to raise their little girl, Lulu.

Lulu is a wild child bent on self-destruction, and apparently has no feelings for anyone who cares for her. She walks out on her mother and moves to New York at a young age, and soon becomes a world-renowned supermodel. Her career is at the top, but because of her drug problems and her very public lesbian affairs, it all falls apart. After disappearing for awhile and having a baby in secret, she reinvents herself as a soap opera star, on the same show where her mother also gets a job. They manage to repair their uneasy relationship and in the end, Lulu's daughter is also on her way to superstardom.

There's a lot packed into only a few pages in this book, so the story always keeps moving. It does not, however, pause much for reflection, or for deep glimpses into the characters. That's too bad, too, because we have a good cast. Millie, Vickie, and Lulu are far from perfect, often selfish and irresponsible, yet (possibly with the exception of Lulu) they are likeable. They make choices that just sometimes aren't good, but I could always relate to the reasons. While it could have benefited from some fleshing out, I still think this was a good, solid book, and a lot of fun!

I'd give this book one star, but I think I am going to reserve that for things I find truly morally offensive. This was such a laughably bad book, though. But not in a good way. Someone wrote here in one of the reviews that it was good because it was only supposed to be a mindless trashy read and accomplished it.

NO, NO, NO! Anyone who picks up this book WANTED a mindless trashy read and we wouldn't be insulting the book if we had gotten it in the first place! No one goes to Joan for great litterature. Come on. But it failed miserably, and I'm speaking as someone who enjoyed one of her other books. For one thing, the brief book tries to cover "four generations" of women.

There is not enough time spent on any of the characters for us to care too much about them. Nothing happens to them that makes us care, either. There's no love story, nothing. I could barely pay attention. And by the way, no sex scenes of any note, just brief and clinical descriptions of stuff. Basically, four beautiful women become famous and have problems. But no interesting love affairs. I can't tell you how boring and bad this book was.

I read this book hoping that it would be a wonderful generational saga like Barbara Taylor Bradford's books or Judith Krantz or even her sister's books, full of juicy details of the roaring twenties, theatre and Hollywood in it's heyday. What I got instead was the literary equivalent of gruel.

How is it possible for Joan Collins, a British subject, not to know that the daughter of a Duke, is styled a Lady not an Honorable? Or that Bugsy Siegal didn't start building his hotel in Vegas till the late forties?

This book was full of cliche's, thin characterization, and bad dialogue. The purported villainess of the piece spends most of the book unseen, only to pop up occasionally like the proverbial bad penny. If this book had come over the transom without a famous name attached, it would not even have published.

Ms. Collins would do well to stick to what she knows.

OK, so, as one reviewer said, this is a no-brainer book and we need that sometimes.
Predictable...yes, but this book has enough twists and turns and even an occasional surprise to actually make you want to continue to the next chapter to see "What happens next?"
As I titled it, "A Beach Book," a book to enjoy along with the sand and surf.