Cotton Candy

Revenge
Sharon Osbourne
Fiction

Every once awhile I need to read something frothy and light. I call these kinds of books cotton candy books. They don’t hold much weight with me after I’m done reading, but the characters and plot are entertaining enough to capture my attention for a few hours. So when I saw that Sharon Osbourne had written a novel, I knew it was time for a cotton candy break.

Revenge is the story of Margaret, Chelsea, and Amber Stone. Margaret always wanted to be a star, but is forced to give up her dreams when she becomes pregnant at seventeen with Chelsea. When her boyfriend abandons her, she marries his sturdy older brother and they have another child together. Both girls eventually end up in show business, and LA, where they start a rivalry to end all rivalries. There’s a lot of sex, back-stabbing, and scandal. This is your typical Jackie Collins fare with the Briticisms ramped up to ten.

I was expecting this book to be horribly cheesy and awful, but it actually wasn’t that bad. Sure, the sex scenes are cringe-worthy and some of the dialogue feels like it was lifted right from a How Not to Write a Novel instructional manual, but the plot was surprisingly engaging and the characters were all interesting. By the end of Revenge, I was convinced there is no way Sharon Osbourne wrote this. Most likely, she thought up the storyline and dictated it to a ghost writer because it’s way too decent to have been written by her.

Bottom line, Revenge is a good beach book, but don’t expect to use much brain power when reading it.