Ryan DeJonghe - The Avid Reader

See that one-star rating up there? Has nothing to do with Maya Sloan as a writer—she’s quite talented. That star represents me throwing this book into the bonfires of hell while I hurl my guts into the bowels of my toilet. My fault though. This was a self-inflicted pain.

I admit to the guilty, yet painful pleasure of flipping through the Rich Kids’ pictures. I say painful pleasure because millions of us get a sick kick from following the site. We’ll never drive around with a lion in our Lamborghini. We’ll never hold onto the railings of our yacht copter to jump into the Mediterranean waters. And, yes, we’ll never fill our bathtub with thousand-dollar bottles of wine. So we look at the pictures, outwardly laughing, inwardly crying (or not). It’s a life that fulfills our wildest imagination. It’s fantasy fulfilled.

So what about the book? The first picture was good. Actually, all the pictures were good. But dang, this is not what I expected. I wanted more inside scoop, but what I got was made-up fairy tales, supposition. It was written well. Again, a nod to Maya Sloan’s talent for making an immensely readable book with realistic characters, but I hated each and every one. Part jealousy, maybe. But really, we have enough sex-driven, drug-fueled, rich hippy adolescents in real life. Do we need to make more up?

It is hard to tell what the goal of this book was. There’s no plot. There’s no continuous character development. I guess it is like the website, just brief glimpses into the lives of uber-rich teens. Here’s where I say it is my fault for going into this expecting anything more. Maybe some actual details about the folks featured on the site would have been nice, but sadly, this is disturbing fiction reflecting a made-up life.

Thanks Gallery Books for providing the electronic copy of this book for me to review. It’s not you; it’s me.