I know it's 'trashy', but I loved this book! It was so dark, and the brilliant thing is how it stands the test of time - despite it being written so many years ago, it is still relevant and fantastic! ( )

Love the book. Love the movie. Simply Love!!!

Valley of the dolls is part gossip column and part case study on how hollywood chews women up and spits them out. There are some feminist ideas in there, and it's certainly a comment on the culture of fame, but there are also a lot of anti-feminist ideas. Women just need a good man, a man who doesn't want them and is therefore strong. And babies, all women want lots of babies. Sucessful women are monsters but really only want a good man to fuck them. Not that a book must be feminist to be well written, but this book didn't even have that going for it. It's trashy and it's hateful and it's like a gossip column if the columist lived with the people they were writing about and was happy to air all the worst parts of them, ignoring or glossing over anything good.

In short, the book is complete trash. The pacing in the first half is terrible, I nearly gave up a million times. The pacing does get better in the second half and we do get Neely in the sanitorium, the only scene of the book I genuinely felt any emotion about. The plot is over the top and the dialogue is, in some places, laughable. ( )

Given her background—a television starlet, who didn't quite make it to the top—it was impossible that Jacqueline Susann had written a novel. It was even more impossible that she had written anything worth reading. However, as it figures out, Jacqueline Susann didn't care about logic, and instead of the smutty predecessor of the modern chick lit novel, we get a socially conscious, audaciously feminist literary novel underneath the veil of a roman á clef in the now infamous and classic 1966 Valley of the Dolls. Chronicling the lives of three friends in a twenty year period, from 1945 to 1965, as they strive to reach the top in the social world of men, Susann's novel is stirring and beckons the reader to turn the page—again and again. Yet most striking, and what makes its readers continue, are her characters: Anne, the plainly beautiful protagonist who just wants to make a life of her own; Neely, a small but powerful lady with a voice to match; and Jennifer, the gorgeous lady who wields her power with her youthful body, all of whom are drawn out so completely, in their flaws, perfections, and most of all their power and claim to it, that readers have not choice but to believe and most importantly care. Simply put, Susann is a masterful storyteller. Running through the plot are themes of woman empowerment, the ability to choose, and the disdainful society treat women who have mastered these concepts. Sadly, this is lost in Susann's legacy of shock and scandal and perhaps at her sometimes (very) unskillful and clumsy writing, or as Truman Capote phrased it "typing." However, in the same vain that Jennifer Weiner claimed that chick lit was an elitist term, perhaps holding and labeling Susann's novel as merely romance (which is it not for many reasons) and popular literature of no use for serious readers is an elitist practice that bars us from socially active literature such as this 400-page volume of a story. ( )

fantastically wonderful filth. ( )