True Hollywood Lies

Despite promises to distinguish between "the Hollywood you know" and the Hollywood her leading lady knows, Brown's debut novel confirms just what you suspect about celebrity and unfolds with all the inevitability of a romantic comedy. Hannah Fairchild is the levelheaded daughter of Hollywood glitterati, more interested, we're told, in astronomy than any other kind of stargazing. But her hobby mostly serves as an abundant source of puns, as she's reduced to working as a personal assistant to British heartthrob Louis Trollope when her famous father dies and her stepmother freezes her trust fund. The wildly egotistical star keeps Hannah on her toes ordering Zone-kosher foods and arranging his trysts. Brown captures the humor of working for a megalomaniac: an offhand remark from Hannah, "Don't go believing your own press clippings," sends her boss into a panic. "Why? What have you read? What have you heard?" A love triangle between Hannah, her boss and his best friend Mick Bradshaw gives the book the tension that drives this well-paced, entertaining story forward. Unfortunately, Hannah is inconsistent as a character and a narrator, wavering between savvy and naïveté, between embracing the spotlight and hiding behind the scenes. Agent, Al Zuckerman . (Oct.)