Fake Plastic Girl

By: Zara Lisbon

Narrated by: Laura Knight Keating

Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

Celebrity-studded parties that last long into the night. Camera flashes and designer clothes. And a body found floating in the Venice Beach canals.

But let's start at the beginning.

Justine Childs is your average teenage girl, until the day ex-child-star Eva Kate Kelly moves in across the way. Eva Kate is gorgeous, seductive, and eager to invite Justine into her glittery world. Their relationship intensifies quickly, but there is a lot they aren't telling each other, and in the midst of the whirlwind, a girl lies dead. Who killed Eva Kate? Justine swears her innocence - and she'd like you to hear her side of the story.

©2019 Spilled Ink, Inc. (P)2019 Recorded Books

This book honestly WOWED me

This book captured me in ways I wasn't expecting. I expected some YA pulp and a dissection of the lifestyles of the young Hollywood rich and famous. What I got was something much more intoxicating, believable, FUNNY...with genuinely shocking twists along the way.

Any fan of Taylor Swift - really anyone at all who has Taylor Swift opinions - will enjoy this book. She's the unofficial third character in a charming way that gives you so much insight into main character Justine's mind.

Laura Knight Keating did such a great job capturing Justine and her problematic, celebrity new BFF Eva Kate Kelly. And Zara Lisbon, in her first book, serves up a world and literary style that I can't wait to re-visit.

The book ends with so many questions and clues that feel masterfully untidy, but I don't mind. If the sequel was available I'd get it right away....couldn't wait for next month's credit.

Highly recommend!

So bad it’s good

Justine Childs is about to tell you a story, a story she swears is the very truth, a story about her whirlwind friendship with former child star Eva-Kate. Yes, *that* Eva-Kate. Don’t believe everything you see on Instagram. Plucked from middle class obscurity, Justine *really* knows her new BFF. Justine has NOTHING to do with Eva-Kate’s death. She swears.

I loved much of FAKE PLASTIC GIRL. The beginning really grabbed me with Justine’s vulnerable, insecure voice. Neglected by her psychologist-to-the-stars mom, Justine is home alone for a month while her mom travels away her impending divorce when Eva-Kate moves across the street. We know Justine has been hospitalized for unnamed psychiatric reasons and that she has an on again off again relationship with her meds. Does this make her an unreliable narrator? Is she psychotic? Homicidal? Does Eva-Kate only exist in her mind? Or maybe Justine was just depressed and she’s perfectly fine now. Or not.

For all the parts I loved about FAKE PLASTIC GIRL, other parts annoyed me. The book is filled with Taylor Swift references and I mean Filled with a capital F. At times the book goes off on Taylor Swift tangents. In many other instances, the young women take about real and fake celebrities who intermingle with Eva-Kate and the story ventures into mundane chit-chat they doesn’t advance the plot and characters.

I would have criticized the non-ending of FAKE PLASTIC GIRL until I saw a second book is being released next year, where we’ll hopefully find out more about Eva-Kate’s death and how reliable Justine tells the story.