Now You See Her (review)

Hope Shay was born Bernadette Romano, but when she landed her first big role as Annie in a dinner theater production, her mother rechristened her with a flashy stage name. Sure that Hope is destined for stardom, her mother sends her to a performing arts school to prepare for her career. There, Hope has a hard time making friends, so she opts for a fantasy relationship with the very real Logan, a relationship that ends with the two of them, in Hope's imaginary world, plotting a kidnapping that would ensure them start-up cash for a new life together in New York. In real life, Hope acts alone, staging her own kidnapping that has the entire country looking for her; her ruse unravels quickly upon her rescue, causing her to be put away in an institution and her father to be stuck with punitive damages. Hope's litany of delusions throughout the first two thirds of the book fully establishes her motivation: no one understands how talented and special she is, everyone's jealous of her, and it's all her mother's fault for pushing her too hard as a kid, even though she admits that she responded to the praise. Although her narration offers a number of clues that her account isn't perhaps as grounded in reality as it seems to her, her incessant whining bogs down her story of her life before the kidnapping. The narrative then shifts to more convenient than credible newspaper and magazine accounts of her search and rescue, and the story concludes with Hope's full recovery and reclaiming of present reality, which ties up loose ends but isn't at all believable in light of the extent of her earlier delusions, and ultimately settles into a critique of mothers and daughters who crave a life in the spotlight. It's a provocative plot, but readers with a media itch will be far better served by Douglas' True Confessions of a Hollywood Starlet (BCCB 2/06).