25) A Hollywood Ending by Robyn Sisman

I've picked up a bunch of chick-lit books on sale at Chapters recently, in an effort to read some light stuff by my pool and speed up my "number of books read" as much as I can... haha. The first one I tried was called A Hollywood Ending, by author Robyn Sisman.

This story is about Paige Carson, famous movie star, who is dissatisfied with how things are going in Hollywood and with how she's beginning to be viewed as a bratty star.  She takes off to London to perform Shakespeare on stage in order to combat her reputation and remember the reason she became an actress in the first place.

Oh, but before you get to that you have page after page of not-so-great-but-also-not-that-exciting things happen to Paige back in Los Angeles.

When the book switches to England, we somethings get the story from the perspective of Ed, Paige's landlord who is trying very hard to be unimpressed with "The Paige Carson" living upstairs -- he thinks she's a snobby Hollywood type, so he sets out to have nothing to do with her.

Things happen, there's a romance, there's a 'misunderstanding that nearly wrecks the whole romance', then next thing you know the book is done.

This wasn't the worst random chick-lit I've ever read.  I liked the characters well enough.  I did find the ending to be a little short with some stuff left up in the air (such as how her performance in As You Like It actually goes, and whether or not she is well-received again back in L.A.).  I felt like the beginning of the book before Paige gets to England dragged on a bit, and my favourite parts of the book were when Ed and Paige were getting to know each other a little and realizing they were wrongly judging one another's behaviours -- but that was only a few scenes, I could have had a little more of that to keep up the romance side of the story.

It wasn't bad, it wasn't fabulous, but it certainly was just the right type of light, lounge-by-the-pool reading that I was searching for.

25 down, 75 to go!