Rachel Reads & Reviews

Since I so enjoyed Calonita’s Secrets of My Hollywood Life, I decided to check out her stand alone novel, Reality Check. While Secrets starred Kaitlin, an actress who had been working on tv and movies since she was 5 years old, the protagonist here is Charlie Reed, a regular girl who waitresses and goes to school in small town Cliffside, Long Island.

It’s a quaint little beachside town, in fact so quaint most businesses and movie theatres close around 8. All the parties are up in the Hamptons and she and her friends complains nothing goes on around there.

But a creative executive is charmed by Charlie when she waitresses for her, and is intrigued by the close friendship she shares with her BFFs, Brooke, Hallie and Kieran and offers an amazing opportunity. Star in their own reality show! Unlike other reality shows, the exec, Susan, promises this will be nicer, this will be authentic. It will be more real life Gilmore Girls than another Real Housewives setup.

Calonita does a great job as usual wth her characterization of Charlie and her friends. She does well in illustrating the toll it takes on Charlie as the reality turns more scandalous than promised, and the subsequent tiredness, sadness, loneliness and confusion that reigns when the producers interfere to make things more exciting as well as fighting to remind her friends of how edited things are in the final product. The lines become blurred as emotions are riled up and even I was kept guessing as to who was really calling the shots and which parts were staged or manipulated

Charlie remains likable albeit with her own flaws like control and self-pity, especially as she was the one hold-out most concerned with how their friendship might suffer until she got swayed by the paycheck potential for her college fund.

Her friends, Hallie and Kieran don’t get as much nuance though they remain likable. Brooke on the other hand is the diva who was most excited by the potential to get out of the beachside to reach MTV fame and her arc of being intially supportive of Charlie being the chosen star to her green eyed jealousy, backstabbing and manipulation was infuriating but understandable. For some, fame is worth everything as the book made pains to point out.

Since Calonita has worked in the industry several years, she also gives behind the scene looks as to how the confessional interviews are staged, how producers try to rile up the protagonists and plant boyfriends or friends to make things more dramatic. Which I think most of us can guess in this day and age that reality is not reality, she also gives backdrop to how negotiations work and the bottom line that drives everyone.

The sideplot of Charlie’s romance was decent. Zac was very sweet and provide a refreshing contrast to all the other users that popped up out of the woodwork ready for their five minutes of fame. It helps that Zac has a fear of public speaking so tv cameras were so not his cup of tea, but I was honestly more into the reality tv side than whether or not they’d end up together.

However, this big had a major flaw in editing. There were so many mispellings. Preckle, “cook things” instead of cool things, “funs” instead of fans, beginging, excricting, etc. Not to mention how it missed capitalizing some names and business. Yet managed to capitalize a verb instead. One or two mistakes make sense, but this was shoddy and really needed a second look. There were just so many mispellings, it shouldn’t have gone to print like that.

Additionally, the book also had little US magazine style clippings of what newsprints were saying about the show which was fitting for the content, but unneeded as they had already wrote down the text of the clippings within the prose. They should have chosen one or the other.

A nice book giving an inside look on reality tv and the importance of friendships even in the midst of fame.

3 stars.