A sparkling read for teens: Spoiled by Jessica Morgan & Heather Cocks
“ARUGULA, PUT THEM DOWN. You know thigh-high sandals give you cankles.”
Brooke Berlin snatched the seven-hundred-dollar Gucci gladiator shoes out of her friend’s hand and threw them back onto the display table, knocking over five and a half pairs of boots in the process. Choosing not to notice the shoes strewn across the floor - Brooke, in life and in shopping, rarely cleaned up her own messes - she cast a concerned frown at the Tyra Banks clone at her side.
“Relax, Brooke, I was just looking,” Arugula said. “Those are so 2008.”
Satisfied that she’d helped save yet another soul from style self-sabotage, Brooke turned and surveyed the modern, high-ceilinged store - shirts crisply folded on tables illuminated from within; white walls lit by metal pendant chandeliers as skinny as the clientele; gleaming chrome benches for those clients’ tired plus-ones - and inhaled deeply. She loved the smell of retail. Shopping was her Xanax, her Red Bull, her cure for the common cold: Brooke truly believed anything could be fixed by flexing the trusty plastic rectangles in her wallet. Some might have called it excessive consumption (like her father, if he ever noticed the bills), but Brooke preferred to think of it as philanthropy. Those poor schmoes wearing name tags pinned to last season’s blouses all worked on commission, and minimum wage wouldn’t even buy half a sushi roll at Nobu. Shopping was practically her patriotic duty.
Sixteen-year-old Molly Dix has just discovered that her biological father is Brick Berlin, world-famous movie star and red-carpet regular. Intrigued (and a little terrified) by her Hollywood lineage, Molly moves to Los Angeles and plunges headfirst into the deep end of Beverly Hills celebrity life. Just as Molly thinks her life couldn’t get any stranger, she meets Brooke Berlin, her gorgeous, spoiled half sister, who welcomes Molly to La-La Land with a smothering dose of “sisterly love” … but in this town, nothing is ever what it seems.
Set against a world of Red Bull-fuelled stylists, tiny tanned girls, popped-collar guys, and Blackberry-wielding publicists, Spoiled is obsessively readable and great fun … unless you are famous.
