This Book Comes Fully Equipped with a Bottle of Wine and Paper Cups
I might be dating myself just a little bit here, but this book is nothing but "Sweet Valley High" on steroids.
Just substitute "blond hair, blue eyed, perfect size six figures" for Asian looks, stir in every single name brand label from "The Devil Wears Prada" and shake vigorously with as much over-the-top displays of porn wealth and Kevin Kwan has written himself a book.
A book that might as well have 1ASIAN1 embossed on the cover and come fully equipped with a bottle of wine and an unlimited supply of paper cups.
Francine Pascal should really push Kevin Kwan into the nearest pool...atop a fifty-seven story building in Singapore.
Rachel and Nick (Elizabeth Wakefield and Todd Wilkins?) do not make a story. Astrid and Michael (the b-plot) try to be the other half of the story but they fail too. There's nothing here but 527 pages of redundant description of extravagant living and a huge ensemble cast of Asian characters that the reader will quickly give up trying to remember, much less care about.
No, it's all about the wealth. The 40 million dollar wedding Rachel and Nick attend and how Princess Astrid (Lila Fowler?) blows nearly the same amount on couture from Paris every year just for the heck of it until she learns her husband Michael may be cheating on her.
Exactly one half of these four characters were born with silver spoons in their mouths, the other half were not.
This book also contains references to oral sex, the f-bomb is dropped several times and every single one of the crazy rich characters are also crazy mean...to everyone they meet. Except Nick, of course. Poor Rachel finds a dead fish in her room, for example, but that's about as extreme as the mean pranks get from the CRA crowd.
Would tricking someone into eating a shaving cream sundae be too much to ask?
What was most disappointing about this book was that Nick and Rachel *spoiler alert* do NOT get married at the end. Astrid and Michael don't reconcile either. Guess you have to read the sequel to find out what happens next.
Unfortunately, I don't really care.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to check what my entire collection of Sweet Valley paperback books might fetch on the 2018 Asian market...