Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper
Author: Hilary Liftin
ISBN13: 9780670016419
Author website/twitter account: https://twitter.com/hilaryliftin
Brought to you by OBS reviewer Kayt
Synopsis:
“I’ve had a million meetings in my acting career, and I had no idea that this would be the one that would change my life forever. I walked into the room, and there was Rob . . . in the flesh.”
Actress Lizzie Pepper was America’s Girl Next Door and her marriage to Hollywood mega-star Rob Mars was tabloid gold—a whirlwind romance and an elaborate celebrity-studded wedding landed them on the cover of every celebrity weekly. But fame, beauty, and wealth weren’t enough to keep their marriage together. Hollywood’s “It” couple are over—and now Lizzie is going to tell her side of the story.
Celebrity ghostwriter Hilary Liftin chronicles the tabloids’ favorite marriage as Lizzie Pepper realizes that, when the curtain falls, her romance isn’t what she and everyone else thought. From her lonely holidays in sumptuous villas to her husband’s deep commitment to a disconcertingly repressive mind-body group, Lizzie reveals a side of fame that her fans never get to see. Full of twists and turns, Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper is a breathless journey to the heights of Hollywood power and royalty and a life in the spotlight that is nearly impossible to escape.
Review:
Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper seems to be the summer beach read from all the reviews and comments. I do not go to the beach, but enjoyed this romp into celebrity gossip magazines and memoirs. Cleverly written by talented ghostwriter Hilary Liftin and in a way that kept me confused as to who was actually writing it, Lizzie or Hilary. Yes I am a fan of those rag mags that stare at us in the checkout line. And yes I am fascinated by the weird life the stars seem to live. There is an obvious blurring of the lines between Lizzie and Rob Mars and the now defunct celebrity couple TomKat. As a reader, I wanted to believe that this was really the inside story of their quick jump from couple, to parents, to wed to secretly whisked away divorce. I am still unsure if the author had some inside information and scattered it among some fiction she wrote, but I think that is one of the things that is so interesting about this book.
The whole of this novel is written in actress Lizzie Pepper’s voice as she tells the story of her life from right before meeting actor Rob Mars through her divorce. As Lizzie changes to Rob’s “Elizabeth” and then back again, the reader gets to see the inside of how she was given everything she could have wanted only to realize it was nothing she could ever truly be happy with. We get to see inside the rumored evil One Cell that sounds not surprisingly like another congregation that we all want to know about. At first Lizzie only sees the good in all the wonderful things coming her way, the man of her dreams, her prince charming says everything a woman could want to hear and is given everything a woman could want. Their life is a fairy tale. It is only later that she realizes it was a scripted one and she was only playing a part.
Lizzie is a wonderful character, whether true or based on fact or fiction. The reader knows how it will end, but the story takes us through all her thoughts and actions. I love her coming upon the scripts that Rob used to woo her and how she reacts to them. With wonderful characters including the woman Rob has set up to be her “caretaker” and Lizzie’s friends. The reader is taken along as she travels, lives in the lap of luxury and then finds a way out of the prison she finally realizes she is in.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was fun, entertaining and never let me down. I still am not sure if this was written with inside knowledge that Ms. Liftin secretly had or if this is all truly fiction. Either way it was a fabulous and well written look into the rich and famous. Lizzie is a character that the reader can root for and wishes the best for. Even at the end of the book, the reader is still led to believe that this could possibly be another ghost writing work and that only the names have been changed to protect the innocent or in this case the writer.
