If normal circumstances can lead to sibling rivalry, finding out when you're already 16 that you have a sister you never knew about, who's the same age as you, would be rough. In Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan's debut novel, Spoiled, they introduce us to Brooke Berlin, only daughter of Hollywood mega-star Brick Berlin. Brooke longs to be an actor and see her face in all the magazines like her dad and is gleefully planning the Sweet 16 party that will be her social debut...when she finds out that she's not actually Brick's only daughter. Right before he met and married Brooke's mother, Kelly, he had a fling with Laurel, a costume designer on a movie set, and only found out about her pregnancy after Kelly was pregnant too. Laurel went back to Indiana and raised her daughter, Molly, to believe that her father was a military man who died before she was born. But Molly finds out the truth just before Laurel passes away, and finds herself on her way to Los Angeles to live with the father and sister she never knew.

That all probably makes this sound kind of heavy, but it's really not. What transpires from there is straight out of 90s/00s high school movie mashup heaven...Brooke and Molly squabble, and Molly finds herself in the middle of a long-standing rivalry between her spoiled brat of a sister and Shelby, the daughter of a tabloid king. She also finds herself torn between her long-time, on-again-off-again hometown boyfriend and the cute boy at her tony new prep school. All this set against the sisters being forced to work together on a production of My Fair Lady. The drama!

I've been a longtime reader and fan of Cocks and Morgan, who write one of my favorite blogs on the internet: Go Fug Yourself. They're very steeped in Hollywood and fashion, given that they write about those things literally every day, and have developed an irreverent, snarky-without-being-mean tone that worked perfectly for this little snack of a YA novel. There are all kinds of little details that are delightful: that Brooke's best friend is named Arugula, Brick's dim-bulb bon mots, a daft football player and his perky blonde girlfriend that are obviously heavily inspired by Kevin and Brittany from Daria. Coming off of reading two heavily-fact-based nonfiction books about Serious Issues, the breeziness of Spoiled really hit the spot. It's kind of like a candy bar: tasty and gone quickly and not especially memorable.

I know they were trying to ground their story in real emotions, but that the whole story takes off from Molly's mother's relatively sudden death from cancer doesn't really work. That this is very much a secondary plot point kind of strains credulity. A 16 year-old just mostly moving on from the death of her only parent without much in the way of emotional trauma? Although it's their feelings about their missing mothers (Brooke's mother has had no contact with her daughter at all in the years since her divorce from Brick) that ultimately forms the glue that bonds Molly and Brooke together in the end (spoiler, but not really because if you can see their reunification coming right from the beginning of their feud), I wish they'd found another way to force Molly out to California because it's jarring every time you're reminded of it. It's a significant false note in what's otherwise a catchy little ditty. Otherwise, this is a fun, silly, light book perfect for when you need an easy read. ( )

really quite good ( )

Spoiled was a snarky, amusing novel at first, but the second time, my opinion changed.

This novel reminds me The Clique series. Molly, similar to Claire Lyons, moves to a new place where she gets tormented by the fabulous rich girl Brooke. In this case, Molly and Brooke turn out to be half-sisters.

Molly is a bland character. She has no interesting aspects of her personality. Claire does. Claire likes photography, candies, wearing Keds and Gap clothing and overall sensitive girl who desires to be fabulous as Massie. What's fascinating about Molly other than she's the daughter of a movie actor? Nothing. The novel hinted she likes running, but she never tried out for track. Her dull personality was hard to root for no matter how hard the authors tried.

Brooke in the other hand, is sassy, self-conceited, glamorous girl with a dark secret. She has an absent mother, whom she writes every day, but never sends. She wants to become like her father. When Molly arrives, Brooke becomes extremely competitive towards her. All she wants is to make her father proud, especially since she's the director of the school production My Fair Lady.

Other than the sharp-tongued quotes and Argula, Brooke's best friend who is Tyra Bank's doppelganger, Spoiled is another book about Hollywood with no surprising elements.

Read The Clique series by Lisi Harrison. The quotes and characters are more memorable and snarkier. ( )

2.5 Stars ( )

I really enjoyed the authors' The Royal We and was intrigued by their YA books they had previously published. Not terribly surprisingly, this is nothing like the 450+ page tome of the epic romance of Rebecca Porter and Prince Nicolas. Instead, this is definitely a YA tale, short yet still manages to not be complete fluff.

Cocks and Morgan, through the story of Brooke Berlin and her newly discovered half-sister Molly Dix, show just how utterly shallow and vapid Hollywood is. It's a pretty predictable storyline but it was still fun to read. One thing that I wanted--and this is true for many YA novels, particularly contemporary YA novels, which seem to be written deliberately short and sweet--is more pages. I wanted more plot, more depth, characterization, etc. As it was, it was a fun story. If it had been longer and the authors allowed the space to fully flesh out the story and the characters--given what they accomplished with 100 more pages in The Royal We--would have been spectacular. ( )