Dear Reader:
Get yourself ready for Mary Lisa Beverly - a soap-opera phenom who's just won her third Daytime Emmy for her role as Sunday Cavendish on Born to Be Wild. She's fun and lovable and has lots of crazy friends, most of whom hang out at her house in the Colony, the famous gated community in Malibu. Unfortunately, there is one bad thing to poleax her champagne life - someone is trying to kill her.
You'll meet Mary Lisa's family in Goddard Bay, Oregon. She's blessed with her father, cursed with her mother, and betwixt and between with her two nutzoid sisters.
And how about guys? There aren't any hotties in L.A. of interest to Mary Lisa, but in Goddard Bay - there are District Attorney John Goddard and Chief of Police Jack Wolf. And guess what? Even in the boondocks, bad stuff can happen.
Mary Lisa's best friends, Lou Lou Bollinger and Elizabeth Fargas, become embroiled in the baffling attempts on Mary Lisa's life in L.A., with unexpected results.
I hope you laugh a lot with Born to Be Wild, root for Mary Lisa in all of her roles, and all in all, have a fine time with this book.
Enjoy.
Reviews with the most likes.
When I picked up this book, I was looking for something akin to a beach read, and this filled the bill in spades. I've been reading a lot of intense books lately about death, metaphysics, and deep spirituality. I needed a change. Something light, quick-paced and not stressful. (COVID gives me enough of that already.)
I learned a lot about soap opera history while reading this book. It contains little tidbits in the story and historic quips at the beginning of some paragraphs. Sort of interesting that the shows were called soap operas because originally most of the sponsors were companies who made soap products.
The book was full of good-looking people, except the bad guys, of course. But there was the qualifying condition that it was set in Los Angeles in the entertainment industry. . . although the cops were cute too, so that sort of blows that theory. But I wanted something fun and this was definitely that.
The violence that drove the story was pretty much off screen which was fine with me. Actually, not a lot of the story was realistic. Instead, it was more of a soap opera, but that fit. Mary Lisa, the main character's pathetic relationship with her own family was almost as dysfunctional as her on screen persona's, the semi-wicked, love-to-hate, star of a soap opera, Sunday Cavendish.
I like a book that can laugh at itself. The romantic lead was Jack Wolf, chief of police in a small city. In the story, characters who worked in the daily soap opera industry teased him about his name, asking if he had made it up to sound like a cop.
If you want a romp that not too deep, this book is for you. I might check out more of Catherine Coulter when I need a light read again.
