Talent (Talent Series #1) by Zoey Dean

From the Publisher

It's all about talent in LA: who has it, who doesn't, who wants it, and who can find it first!

When thirteen-year-old Mac Armstrong witnesses newcomer Emily Mungler's stellar lying-to-gain-entry performance during a movie premiere party at the Roosevelt in Hollywood, it dawns on her that her own talent is to discover it in others! So Mac and her BFFs set out to prove it by turning fresh-from- Cedartown-Iowa Emily into a box office bombshell. They'll make deals, throw parties, crush on boys, all on the way to discovering that no matter how famous or important you are, friendship always comes first. Well, almost always.

Publishers Weekly

Dean (the A-List series) is as of the moment as Us Weekly when it comes to fashion and celebrity lifestyles. Her devotees will lap up this first installment of her new series, this time about the cutthroat lives of the middle-school set, daughters of Hollywood royalty. The chapters switch between four "rising eighths"-Mac, Becks, Coco and the about-to-be "discovered" Emily from Iowa. The story has zero girl-bonding sweetness and all the backstabbing, social-climbing and girls living life as if they're adults that genre fans expect and love. There may not be a single redeeming value among these mocktail-drinking characters (with the possible exception of Emily), but with name brand-dropping every other sentence, sometimes in clever prose-"What in the world did Ruby Goldman have up her cropped James Perse sleeve?"-together with super-catty dialogue and gossipy prose, the page-turning becomes compulsive. Ages 12-up. (June)

Children's Literature

I couldn't bring myself to read this book cover to cover. My initial reaction was "Such drivel?I can't read this (expletive)." I read the first few chapters and scanned the rest, reading the last two chapters, and was so negatively impressed by the shallow, shameless and crass materialism, and the mention on practically every page of some brand-named product. If this were a fashion magazine, it would probably be nearly 1,000 pages instead of 288. And those pages would be more interesting than the bulk of this book because they would be in color in an effort to appeal to the acquisitive nature of we humans, especially impressionable pre-adolescents and adolescents. There are references on nearly every page to name-brands, which this reader found distracting and annoying, if not irresponsibly shallow. Why such drivel should pass as suitable reading material for teens is beyond me. If the author didn't seek some reimbursement for the advertisements, she's missing an opportunity to maximize the return on her "literary" efforts. The one redeeming factor I found is that the main character's mother did exert her influence over the girl's apparel and the girl did obey her mother without a hissy fit. Reviewer: Miriam Gottschalk

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