The Nannies by Melody Mayer

Synopsis: Kiley, Lydia, and Esme are three very different girls who end up being nannies (surprise!) and friends. Kiley is seventeen and on her way to win the latest reality show, Platinum Nanny, the winner of which gets the job of nanny to the children of Platinum, a washed-up rock star. Lydia has just returned from eight years in the Amazon with her do-gooder parents to nanny her nephew and niece. Esme stumbles on a nanny job with her parents’ rich employers because she speaks Spanish fluently; they have just adopted two Spanish orphans. They all feel like a fish out of water in Los Angeles, which draws them together. They further bond when they help Esme out of trouble connected to Hispanic gangs she is peripherally involved with. The ending obviously leaves room for further plot and character development in sequel.

Rating: Moderately amusing.

Opinion: This is a kind of tame wild ride through rich Los Angeles. From the cover, I expected it to be kind of like the Gossip Girls series (which, admittedly, I have not read yet), but it contained less drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll than I expected. Even though the major plot points were very predictable, it was an entertaining read. Excellent beach reading.

How to be Popular by Meg Cabot

(There are plot spoilers below. Just giving you fair warning.)

Meg Cabot is one of my favorite young adult authors, so I expected a good book when I started this one. I was a little bit disappointed, as it wasn’t quite as good as her Princess Diaries series. Mia (Princess Diaries) is a much more engaging central character than Steph (How to be Popular). I wasn’t really convinced of Steph’s reason for wanting to be popular, which is that she is tired of being a social outcast and hated by everyone except her two friends. As one of her friends points out, why would she want to be friends with people who have been so cruel to her? She does succeed in being popular for a week, but it all comes crashing down when she refuses to let the popular crowd have a big party in her grandfather’s observatory. After that, of course, everyone hates her for being a killjoy. In the end, they all end up hanging out together at a coffee house, which seems highly unlikely given that they all hated her not moments before. It is a very pat ending to an otherwise fairly realistic book about high school politics. I think the reason that the ending doesn’t work for me is that the popular characters were not as round as Steph. They were more flat, and therefore their sudden about-face seemed strange. I think that if the secondary characters had had more development, their reconciliation would have appeared more realistic.

Apart from the ending, I enjoyed the book. It was a good, light, and entertaining read. I think I’ll go reread the Princess Diaries now.

Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes

It’s not often that a book makes me stay up to the wee hours of the morning to to finish it. It’s even less often that a book makes me cry. This book did both. This is the second novel by this author I’ve read (the other being Sushi for Beginners), and the covers of both make them seem like lightweight chick lit. Both were definitely not. Rachel’s Holiday is told from the point of view of a drug addict, Rachel. The really captivating part is that, from the beginning, the reader is inside Rachel’s head, and Rachel seems to be completely unaware that she is an addict and that her drug addiction is destroying her life. When she overdoses on sleeping pills, her family forces her to go to a rehab clinic. It is amazing to read this book because the reader does not realize that she is a drug addict, just as Rachel does not because she is in denial. The reader goes through the process with Rachel to get beyond the addiction to try to lead a normal life. This is a really well-written book. The end.