Fake Plastic Girl by Zara Lisbon (review)

Justine’s mother is a therapist to the stars, and and Justine longs to be noticed by celebrity A-listers. When seventeen-year-old Eva-Kate Kelly, who has been a star since she was eight, moves in next door, Justine finally gets her wish. From their first meeting, Eva-Kate adopts Justine as her “emotional support girl,” believing that Justine’s ordinariness is the key to what she’s missing in her life. Justine ignores her former friends’ and her parents’ advice to stay grounded, and she is happily swept into Eva-Kate’s orbit until she learns a devastating truth about their relationship. Before she has a chance to confront Eva-Kate, though, the star is found dead, and readers will have to wait for a sequel to learn the rest of the story. The narrative is told in retrospect, with an insistence that Eva-Kate was not murdered, and that all evidence pointing to Justine as suspect is contrived. The glossy story goes down easily and the pages turn very quickly indeed. However, Justine’s list of reasons as to why she has a right to be aggrieved over her lack of celebrity attention sets her up as delusional at best and unstable at worst, as do hints of a stay in a psychiatric hospital and her tiresome obsession with Taylor Swift. Eva-Kate herself is little more than a cliché of vapid celebrity, without enough depth to sustain more than a passing interest for anyone except Justine. That said, this does have the catnip quality of celebrity gossip and Instagram addiction, which may be all some readers need to wonder what happened to Eva-Kate.