Lulu is about to turn eleven, and all she wants for her birthday is to throw a party that her famous parents will actually want to attend. Though she lives in Hollywood in a fancy mansion, and her parents are routinely nominated for Academy Awards, Lulu manages to shelter herself from Hollywood culture to the point that she doesn’t even have a cell phone, so her sister, Alexis takes on the party planning. Unfortunately, despite Alexis’s efforts to plan the perfect spa-themed party and to invite only the most popular and perfect guests, it turns out that Lulu’s party is the very night that her parents have to attend the Oscars. Disappointed that her one birthday wish is in danger of not coming true, Lulu comes up with a back-up plan that is sure to bring her parents to her party, even if just for a few minutes.
This book is written almost entirely as a movie screenplay, with just a few interruptions here and there from Lulu when background information is required. It took me quite a while to settle into this format, especially because the text switches between dialogue, stage directions, third person descriptions and first person commentary. It’s not hard to keep track of which type of writing is which, but it feels stilted sometimes to read a script instead of watching it be performed.
Lulu herself is not my favorite middle grade protagonist. I appreciate that she represents a challenge to the media-saturated culture surrounding her, but her over-enthusiastic voice and obnoxious sayings like, “Geez peas!” made me laugh at her more than sympathize with her. She is obviously meant to be a good person who tries to do the right thing even when her parents are basically clueless, but I didn’t care much for her, and I found her family and environment just as off-putting. I struggled to make it through her many interactions with the Pop Girls and the devious planning required just to get her parents to attend her birthday party. I especially didn’t like that the book doesn’t really criticize her parents for being absent and neglectful - rather, the entire premise of the novel assumes that the burden is on Lulu to get her family to pay attention to her and love her. If the point of this book is that being oneself pays off, it fails to make that point. What I took away from the story is the understanding that Lulu is starved for affection and that her nanny is more of a parent than either her biological mother or her biological father.
This high-interest novel will certainly find readers among tween girls who are fascinated by celebrity and largesse, but I can’t imagine that girls who are truly like Lulu would have the patience or interest to sit through more than 200 pages of vapid girls discussing spa treatments. It was painful to subject myself to that much superficiality in one book, and the message of the story is so muddled, the effort didn’t even really pay off that heavily. For more authentic stories about tween girls that also involve acting and filming, try After Iris by Natasha Farrant, Reel Life Starring Us by Lisa Greenwald, and the Sisters Club series by Megan McDonald.
I received a digital ARC of Lulu in La La Land from Sourcebooks Jabberwocky via NetGalley.
For more about this book, visit Goodreads and Worldcat.
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