cover image Hollywood Dreamers

Hollywood Dreamers

Judy Spencer. Beaufort Books, $17.95 (429pp) ISBN 978-0-8253-0355-5

It is difficult to find any merit in this graceless novel. Perky Karen Bloom, on an acting scholarship to NYU, moves into a Greenwich Village apartment with gorgeous, doomed Lake Eastman, a runaway from Connecticut who has terrible nightmares. Karen falls in love with Harry, a handsome lightweight, but marries Matt, an intellectual movie director who cannot ""satisfy'' her. Lake hooks up with suave, brutal Daniel; then she moves to California, works truck stops at night for excitement and becomes a TV star. She begins an affair with Harry, now married. In New York, Karen falls in love with Joe, an actor who gets beaten up by someone who looks like Daniel but is really Lake's demented father. Harry kills himself; Lake isapparentlymurdered by her father, the continuing cause of her night terrors, which aren't really nightmares at all. Karen divorces Matt, becomes a star, marries Joe, and thinks a lot about Lake and love and lives gone wrong. This book does not even qualify as mindless entertainment. (June 20)