Beautiful People. Wendy Holden

Read Beautiful People in one weekend. Laughed loads. Love when I have a chance to just sit back and discover someone else's crazy life.

I have been a fan of Wendy Holden since I first read Farm Fatale. She writes British Chick Lit that is just wonderful. Beautiful People is another hit with me, in fact, I think it is her best work to date. You are immediately sucked in by the characters and the plot which covers a lot of ground quickly. This will be one of the summer's best beach reads. It is pure frothy fun! If you enjoy Sophie Kinsella or Helen Fielding, you will love this author.

I gobbled up Beautiful People, a fun story of the acting industry on both sides of the pond, Hollywood and the London stage. Darcy, a young British actress is the daughter of an acting family where the stage is the ultimate form of their craft and film is a lower form of the art. Belle is a young Hollywood actress desperate for a come-back after her recent meteoric rise and then sudden crash-and-burn. The lives of these two extremely different young actresses intersect in Southern Italy, along with former boyfriends and lovers, and potential new lovers and friends in a hysterical series of almost improbably coincidences and run-ins. The novel is peppered with secondary characters that are no less interesting than our heroine and antagonist. Emma, the conscientious Nanny who falls in love with her charges; Orlando, the extraordinarily beautiful, shy young man bullied by a social climbing mother, who is unsure of his future path, and Marco the amazing chef/owner of a wonderful local bistro are all people I would want to sit and have coffee with, or a glass of wine at Marco's restaurant. Not so much though for Christian, the opportunistic Hollywood heart-throb or Niall the pretentious wanna-be London stage actor, both of whom use women shamelessly, Christian at least admitting to everyone about his intentions. Not only did Beautiful People have me laughing, I was entranced enough to not put the book down, hoping that certain characters would succeed and prosper and others would get a good comeuppance or smack in the face. Light-hearted women's fiction can sometimes be predictable, which is definitely not the case with Beautiful People.