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albatrossonhalfpointe 's review for:
Lace
by Shirley Conran
Four elegant, successful, sophisticated women in their forties have been called to New York to meet Lili, the world-famous movie actress.
Already a legend despite her youth, Lili is beautiful, passionate, notoriously temperamental... Each of the four has a reason to hate Lili. And each of them is astonished to see the others; for they are old friends who first met in school, old friends who share a guilty secret - old friends whose lives are changed when Lili suddenly confronts them and asks, "Which one of you bitches is my mother?"
The answer to this question - a question that has obsessed and almost destroyed Lili - is at the heart of Lace. As the reader travels from an elegant Swiss finishing school in Gstaad to the glittering places where the rich and successful congregate, the book traces not only the life of Lili herself - abandoned, seduced, exploited, but at last rising to triumph as a star - but the lives of the four women, one of whom is her mother.
The blurb actually goes on for several more paragraphs, and I was tempted to include them, because I wanted to point out a few things in there that make me wonder if whoever wrote the blurb actually read the book, but anyway.
I don't actually have all that much to say about the book, although I enjoyed it. It fits a formula, that of 3 or four women who meet in school and become close friends. They're all wealthy, except one, who either marries into wealth by the end or creates her own. One of the wealthy ones has been raised to feel perpetually inadequate. One of them's foreign. There's bound to be some exotic royalty (sometimes one of the women, sometimes someone else). And there's some sort of secret scandal, usually involving somebody's pregnancy. It's good light chick reading, although not as light as, say, the Shopaholic series.
This particular incarnation of that formula was actually quite good. Well-developed, believable characters, in well-written situations. I was starting to think Conran had issues with men, but all the girls eventually found love, and I guess we all go through a few Mr. Wrongs before we find Mr. Right.
One thing I did think was really kind of neat about this book was the way she depicted female friendship. In fiction, female friendships are almost always torn apart somehow when they feature so prominently in a story. The deeper the friendship is portrayed in the beginning, the more likely it is to fall apart by the end. This one didn't. The four women went their separate ways after school, but remained close friends who stayed in contact, visited often, and were always there for each other if one of them needed help. There was one blip between two of them, but as soon as they figured out that it was engineered by th guy involved, they immediately picked up where they left off, with no lingering feelings of resentment or suspicion. Right to the end, they protect each other. After Lili finds out which one is her mother, and wants to know who her father is, the mother hides the truth to avoid hurting both Lili and one of the other three (even though it was ancient history), and all three know she's lying, for various reasons, but instead of suspecting the worst, they believe that she has good reasons, and not one of them calls her on it. It's nice to see female friendship portrayed like that, because that really is how the really good ones are.
I've learned that there's a sequel, in which Lili goes looking for her father (the stated father is dead, so I guess she learns that that wasn't true after all?), and I think I'm going to read that, because there really were good reasons for her mother to keep that information to herself, so I'm actually quite curious how all that's going to go down.
Already a legend despite her youth, Lili is beautiful, passionate, notoriously temperamental... Each of the four has a reason to hate Lili. And each of them is astonished to see the others; for they are old friends who first met in school, old friends who share a guilty secret - old friends whose lives are changed when Lili suddenly confronts them and asks, "Which one of you bitches is my mother?"
The answer to this question - a question that has obsessed and almost destroyed Lili - is at the heart of Lace. As the reader travels from an elegant Swiss finishing school in Gstaad to the glittering places where the rich and successful congregate, the book traces not only the life of Lili herself - abandoned, seduced, exploited, but at last rising to triumph as a star - but the lives of the four women, one of whom is her mother.
The blurb actually goes on for several more paragraphs, and I was tempted to include them, because I wanted to point out a few things in there that make me wonder if whoever wrote the blurb actually read the book, but anyway.
I don't actually have all that much to say about the book, although I enjoyed it. It fits a formula, that of 3 or four women who meet in school and become close friends. They're all wealthy, except one, who either marries into wealth by the end or creates her own. One of the wealthy ones has been raised to feel perpetually inadequate. One of them's foreign. There's bound to be some exotic royalty (sometimes one of the women, sometimes someone else). And there's some sort of secret scandal, usually involving somebody's pregnancy. It's good light chick reading, although not as light as, say, the Shopaholic series.
This particular incarnation of that formula was actually quite good. Well-developed, believable characters, in well-written situations. I was starting to think Conran had issues with men, but all the girls eventually found love, and I guess we all go through a few Mr. Wrongs before we find Mr. Right.
One thing I did think was really kind of neat about this book was the way she depicted female friendship. In fiction, female friendships are almost always torn apart somehow when they feature so prominently in a story. The deeper the friendship is portrayed in the beginning, the more likely it is to fall apart by the end. This one didn't. The four women went their separate ways after school, but remained close friends who stayed in contact, visited often, and were always there for each other if one of them needed help. There was one blip between two of them, but as soon as they figured out that it was engineered by th guy involved, they immediately picked up where they left off, with no lingering feelings of resentment or suspicion. Right to the end, they protect each other. After Lili finds out which one is her mother, and wants to know who her father is, the mother hides the truth to avoid hurting both Lili and one of the other three (even though it was ancient history), and all three know she's lying, for various reasons, but instead of suspecting the worst, they believe that she has good reasons, and not one of them calls her on it. It's nice to see female friendship portrayed like that, because that really is how the really good ones are.
I've learned that there's a sequel, in which Lili goes looking for her father (the stated father is dead, so I guess she learns that that wasn't true after all?), and I think I'm going to read that, because there really were good reasons for her mother to keep that information to herself, so I'm actually quite curious how all that's going to go down.