Jackie Collins (1937–2015)

Raw, racy and rambunctious, this novel is funny, fast-paced and incisive. I would never have read Collins if a friend wasn't a fan. I was expecting saccharine melodrama, not satire. The characters float through the unexpected, trying to remain cynical throughout but Collins does a great job of showing the chink in the armour, making the protagonist a likeable one, naive and soft in his own way, despite his bravado and conceit.
Full of pizzazz and 70s glamour, this book was a crisp and quick show more read which I definitely enjoyed! show less

I was going to give this book two stars like I normally do for garbage books that never pretend to be anything other than garbage books, but there is a dog in this book named Amy Winehouse because, well, it sounds just like Amy Winehouse. That's apparently how things work, so in solidarity with Jackie Collins, upon witnessing my cat hacking up a hairball on a piece of paper and then trying to fuck it, I've renamed my cat Jackie Collins.

Someday, I'm going to write a book called The Dude With show more the Plane and the Huge Dick, stick a pen name on the front, and then make 60 million pounds or however much this old hag had when she croaked out. It's all so, so bad. I just don't understand. Maybe other people read it for the same reason I do; each of them has a shitty friend who will only read the intentionally terrible books they're given for Christmas if someone else does it first. Do these people not have a TV? I love reading. I really, really love reading. But you'll get far more out of bad TV than a bad book and it takes like 10% of the time.

But wait, you say! There's sex in this thing! Well, let's examine the text for a good example on how to get a steady diet of sex in your media. Benito, a grumpy young stereotype with a prominent role in this book, decides he wants to get a boner. How does he go about this? Does he pick up a Jackie Collins book and read it until page 264, at which point he could read a paragraph-and-a-half blow job? Actually, he doesn't. Straight to the porn for our hero. See, at first I didn't think there was a lesson to take from this thing, but maybe there is!

And please, PLEASE don't give me the shtick about how Collins' fiction is somehow supposed to depict what Hollywood is actually like. What the fuck is this supposed to be, a parable? Can anyone explain to me what a dude with really nice abs desperately trying to pork a lawyer after getting blown by Madonna says about Los Angeles that isn't already self-evident? "A LIFE OF FAME AND FORTUNE ISN'T WHAT IT'S CRACKED UP TO BE," said Mother Goose in like the 15th century. "OCCASIONALLY, HOT RICH PEOPLE DO SEX STUFF," I believe comes directly from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. This is all old news. We get it already! How many fucking shiny-eyed rubes do you think we've got left in this country? DON'T ANSWER THAT QUESTION

Also, lest we forget, a lady gets straight up raped right at the beginning of this book, and it's handled with all the sensitivity that such a subject deserves, assuming you, like Jackie Collins, believe that being a rape victim is super similar to eating too much pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving. The victim is grumpy for a couple chapters (which are like three pages each in a 400 page book, meaning we're talking one wad of cum in the Arctic Ocean), after which she just gets over it and becomes the "Poor Little Bitch Girl" that we love to hate. Now I'm a man who's completely empty on the inside, and that seems callous and dismissive even to me.

What's fascinating to me is that this isn't the first time I've talked about a situation like this in a terrible book. The way I see it, bad authors, much like good authors, will occasionally write about real world problems that involve interesting complications. What separates the good from the bad is that a good author will both acknowledge and examine the issues, while a bad one will 100% of the time get scared and push it all out of the way as quickly as possible.

In both the James Patterson books I've read, there is a minor character with mental illness that has been failed by both a family and a healthcare system. One is homeless. One is in prison. What can we do to help such people? What can we do to prevent this from happening in the future? Is it our responsibility to get them help, or is it theirs? These are all questions that a good writer could explore through fiction. Instead, Patterson takes the equally commendable route of making fun of them. "LOL that guy thinks he hears voices. Why would anyone want to consider whether his tragic life outcome was necessary?" Fair enough, James.

Jackie Collins, in Poor Little Bitch Girl, has an opportunity to expound on the traumatic experience of a prostitute who has been raped. Who can she talk to about it? Will she feel guilty, even though she shouldn't? Does she have an obligation to report the rapist at the risk of her livelihood in order to keep him from victimizing someone else? It'd be one thing if Jackie had left it to the readers to answer those questions, but she doesn't even make the fucking CHARACTERS answer the questions, which I would have told you was impossible to pull off before I read this book. These are questions that our protagonist MUST answer, because that shit happened to her, but Jackie just kind of lets it all fade away. She didn't even have the courtesy to pull a James Patterson and turn it into a reprehensible joke. Yeah, that's right Jackie. I just called you worse than James Patterson.

Now feel free to tell me that these books are supposed to be light reads that shouldn't be taken too seriously. "Nobody reads Jackie Collins to think too much! Why can't you just let a dumb book be dumb?" Well, motherfucker, I'm not the one that dropped a lady getting raped in my non-serious book. If you don't want to deal with rape, you don't have to write about it! Do you know how many rapes there are in The Very Hungry Caterpillar? Not very many! (And no, the sequel The Very Horny Caterpillar is not canon) Do you know how many rapes there are in Norm Macdonald's autobiography? Two, and they're both hilarious!

That's where you fucked it all up, Jackie. If you really felt like you needed to write about rape without taking it seriously, you needed to write a fake memoir that takes exactly zero things seriously. Your book, as crazy as it sounds, just wasn't absurd enough to get away with it.

Oh well. It is what it is. All this shit is what it is. Happy New Year. show less

It has been years since I have read anything by Jackie Collins but I have fond memories of the early books that featured Lucky Santangelo. I think I was maybe eleven when I discovered Chances and was immediately enthralled by the glitz, violence and sex, a heady combination for a young suburban girl half a world away from Las Vegas. Lucky was wild, powerful and rich and I vaguely remember thinking I wanted to be just like her when I grew up. So, when I was offered the chance to read and show more review Confessions of a Wild Child: Lucky-The Early Years I simply could not resist.

This book begins as Lucky, just shy of fifteen years old, is sent to an exclusive girl’s boarding school with her father, Gino, intent on making his daughter into a lady in preparation for marriage and motherhood. But boarding school gives Lucky an education neither she nor her father expected,

Confessions is written from Lucky’s first person, present tense perspective. It reads as if a teenager wrote it with simple language and breathy dramatic asides “No more little Miss Innocent.”. It didn’t really work for me, the experience is not unlike reading your own teenage diary twenty years or more after the fact, without the rosy glow of nostalgia.

If you have read Chances or Lucky there won’t be any surprises in this book, Lucky’s youthful antics have already been covered there. The plot is shallow with the focus on Lucky discovering the power she wields with her burgeoning sexuality, on her terms. There is plenty of sex, though little that is actually explicit. Lucky is all about ‘Almost’, though friends Liz and Olympia aren’t so discerning. The story ends on the eve of sixteen year old Lucky’s marriage – you’ll have to read Chances to find out what happens next.

I have no idea who the audience for this book might be, I wouldn’t hand this over to a teenager (hypocritical I know) and for fans of the Lucky series, Confessions has nothing new to offer. While it was sort of nice to be reminded of my first experience reading Jackie Collins, Confessions itself was a disappointing read. show less

Jackie Collins novels are a ridiculous, compulsively readable, guilty, trashy pleasure - and I have devoured them all. Her novels are about greed, sex, drugs, smut, and sleaze - in a word, Hollywood and how people will do ANYTHING for the chance to be rich and famous. A lot has changed since the 70�Ûªs, but we can be sure that THIS is still a truth universally acknowledged. These books are even more fun to read now, when Hollywood is trying to pretend it‰Ûªs the bastion of show more moral authority.

I got Sinners as a Kindle daily deal and thought it was one of Jackie Collins novels that I had missed back in the day. But after first page about Herbert the creepy chauffeur and his fat wife Marge I realized that I had read it already, probably more than once. This one was written in the early 70s and it's especially fun because of the cheesy vibe and dialogue. show less