Book Review: "The A-List: Hollywood Royalty"

Like many a best-selling teen book series, Zoey Dean's The A-List has its own new spin-off: The A-List: Hollywood Royalty. Out with the old, in with the new as far as the cast of characters goes. There's very, *very* subtle references to old characters such as Sam Sharpe, but they are mentioned only in passing and as if you must know who they're speaking of.

The new cast of characters is almost befitting of any given group of Disney channel teen stars in the past decade. And almost all of them, you can practically tell what real celebrity they're based loosely off of. (The most obvious of these is Myla - the name practically heralding to Miley, and the family beckoning the the Brangelina pack.) Unlike the last cast of characters, who at least were a sophisticated sort of Hollywood overpampered teen jet-set, the new ones are just spoiled rotten brats with entitlement issues and nothing but teen dating angst problems.

The entire tone of the book is vastly different from that of the original series as well. (If I didn't know better, I would swear that this were ghost-written by somebody else.) I'm sure that the author was trying to go for something hip, fresh, and new, but it just comes off as typical run of the mill teen novel fodder. Where the original A-List books seemed to be a notch above the rest, bordering on being considered acceptable adult reading material, these are most definitely targeted towards a younger demographic. I'm not sure that I like that. Regardless, there only seems to be two more books in this series so far, and doesn't look like there will be more as far as I can tell as of yet. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.) I think I can see why. I'm only rating this book a 3 out of 5 stars - not utterly unreadable, but far from a pleasurable read, I must admit.