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    Glitter Baby
    Glitter Baby
    Glitter Baby
    Audiobook14 hours

    Glitter Baby

    Written by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

    Narrated by Julia Gibson

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Welcome to the world of the Glitter Baby

    Fleur Savagar is the most beautiful woman in the world . . . to everyone but herself. With her oversized hands and paddle-boat feet, her streaky blond hair and funny green eyes, she lives a life filled with secrets that began before she was born. That was when her bewitching mother left home to find James Dean and met Errol Flynn instead. Now Fleur has to grow up quickly, and life won't make that easy.

    Jake Koranda is both New York's most brilliant playwright and Hollywood's hottest actor. Difficult, talented, and tormented, he has no patience for international glamour girls, not even ones with beautiful bodies and smart-aleck mouths. But there's more to the Glitter Baby than shine, and Fleur's tougher than Jake expects. Even with the odds stacked against her, she's fiercely determined to discover the woman she's destined to be.

    An ugly duckling who can't believe she's turned into a swan . . . A tough-guy movie star with a haunted past . . . In a land of broken dreams, can two unlikely lovers trust their hearts?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateDec 30, 2008
    ISBN9780061769382
    Glitter Baby
    Author

    Susan Elizabeth Phillips

    Susan Elizabeth Phillips is a #1 New York Times bestselling author whose books have been published in over thirty languages. Guided by the motto, “Life is better with happily-ever-afters,” she loves writing about love in all its forms. Among her accomplishments, Susan created the sports romance with her novel Fancy Pants. She is best known for her Chicago Stars and Wynette, Texas series, as well as multiple stand-alone books. Visit Susan’s website at www.susanelizabethphillips.com.

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    Reviews for Glitter Baby

    3.5/5

    246 ratings13 reviews

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    • 3/5
      If you can make it through the first half of this, especially the first 15%, you'll enjoy the heroine's story in the second. The first 15% is all about the mother and how the heroine is conceived, it does play an important part in showcasing her mother's personality and the circumstances and players that shape the heroine's existence, but before you see the payoff in the second half, there is definitely a feeling of "what is the point?". The second half is the redemption and finding her strength for the heroine. A blank canvas of a mother who wants to get her self-worth only from Hollywood stars and an old lecherous father (he is her step-father but not known to heroine until start of second half), emotionally damages Fleur (heroine) enough, that she runs away from her modeling and acting life to live obscurely and in hiding from her step-father, for a couple years. When she matures enough to gain her strength again, she starts to build a life for herself. The last quarter is Fleur building up her business and friendships and I really enjoyed her character and personality; she can be self-depreciating but also witty, strong, sassy, and fearless. Her wit and sass really shine through in the relationship between her and the hero Jake, her co-star in her first movie. Jake has quite the background story with his PTSD from the Vietnam War but it is just about buried, until the end, in favor of the dramatics involving Fleur's mother and step-father. I loved when Fleur and Jake got to be the center of attention together, they were fun to read but I would guess their romance is only around 30% of this story. Jake was a hero I would have loved to have seen delved into more and given more page time.This was kind of a mish mash of women's fiction and romance and until you read the last half, you can't really appreciate all the lecherous old men wanting adolescent women to make them feel young again, that you had to suffer through to fully understand what shaped Fleur's circumstances and give it emotional heft. Fleur and Jake were a pleasure but I'm not sure I was given enough of them to make up for having to read about Fleur's step-father's (he's around 70ish to her 19) dream of creating a perfect child with her because she was the child of Errol Flynn, his lecherous old friend in arms.
    • 4/5
      Loved (and hated) the characters. Good story with a few twists. Fun, "girly" read.
    • 5/5
      I really like this book. It starts boring and then it picks up the story. It's very good. I love Fleur. We can follow her growing as a person especially in her relationship with her brother.
      She had a shitty mother and a psycho father. But she was strong and her own person.
    • 5/5
      This story captured my interest from the beginning and maintained it throughout. In addition to the main romance, it explored relationships from 1950s through 1980s. Fleur is the beautiful Glitter Baby model. Jake is famous actor and playwright. Both carry lots of baggage.
    • 3/5
      GLITTER BABY is more saga than romance, a kind of book that doesn't get published often these days. As other reviewers have mentioned, Phillips starts us off from the mother’s POV and only switches over to Fleur after sixty pages or so, once she’s chronicles out heroine’s conception. Phillips sort of speed-walks us through Fleur’s childhood and teenage years, slowing down a bit when Fleur emerges as a sixteen-year-old supermodel.

      I think the pacing of the book, skipping through the years as it does, covers a multitude of sins. Belinda, for example. The mother. With the book’s epic scope Phillips never has to stop and really dwell on the plausibility of Belinda’s character. We’re supposed to believe that she’s childlike, a perpetual innocent who’s also deeply manipulative and selfish. Belinda worships celebrities and has no regard for anyone else. The early chapters of the book make it hard to hate Belinda, although I got there eventually, but mostly I thought a real person who acted like she did would have to be either mentally handicapped or properly psychopathic. But Belinda isn’t presented as either.

      Same with Alexi, whose complexities disappear into a sea of mustache-twirling. He’s a genuinely terrifying character but a lot of his attempts to sabotage Fleur can be written off as pranks. With his power and motivation, why does he hold back?

      Jake, the romantic lead, suffers the most from Phillips’ skimming. We don’t get any real insight into his character until very late in the book. Up to a key turning point, it’s hard to understand who he is, what he wants, how he feels about Fleur or why. It doesn’t help that we see hardly anything of him in the first half of the book; he’s absent a lot more than he’s present. (It’s also hard to buy a character who’s a salt-of-the-earth manly man, a top-billing actor, and a Pulitzer prize winning playwright…)

      The first scene we get with Fleur describes her as a rebel. Really wild and daring, a kid who flouts the rules and defies convention. I only started to get her as a character, and think she made sense, when I realized that first scene is an anomaly. After it’s over, Phillips introduces the real Fleur and she’s not a rebel at all. She’s conventional, staid almost, with a desperate need for approval. A born follower who has a very hard time achieving mental, emotional, and financial independence. That’s the essential story of the book and it’s well-told.

      I picked up GLITTER BABY because I like star-studded romances. GLITTER BABY qualifies, what with Fleur’s celebrity and Jake’s acting, but Belinda’s presence alone leeches all the fun out of that; it’s impossible to moon over celebrities with her oozing around. And Fleur’s legal father spends most of the book trying to seduce her. The ick factor is really, really high.

      Go ahead and pick it up if this sounds like your cup of tea; just know what you’re getting into.
    • 3/5
      There were parts I loathed--most of what Belinda did, and that creepster Alexi, and parts that I really enjoyed--the relationship between Jake and Fleur, Fleur's entire comeback. (Hey, I'm a huge sucker for a makeover...or, in this case, a re-makeover) And her web of friends was great.

      I think this is a 3.5 star SEP.

    • 5/5
      Great book! Captivating, fabulous.
    • 5/5
      A great coming of age story.Fleur Savagar, the illigitimate daughter of a famous movie star, has been brought up at a convent in France, where she has been since she was a baby. She saw her mother Belinda, twice a year but did not meet her step father Alexi, until she was 16 and he had plans for her. Her brother Michel has also not had much love in his life but Fleur was jealous of him because she thought he had everything that she did not – she was wrong.Fleur is a pawn in her parent's twisted lives, obsessions, and desires. She is incredibly beautiful so her mother capitalizes on this by making her into a model first then an actress. Fleur is not interested in either of these careers but wants to please her mother who wants to be in the "limelight" amongst beautiful, and more importantly, famous people. Fleur, still dealing with her abandonment issues and wants to make her mother happy and agrees to a life she does not want.Jake Koranda is one of the "yummiest" hero's I've read in a long time. He is funny and yet deep. He's tortured, but not too much so -just tortured enough to make your heart bleed for him. He and Fleur are destined and meant for each other - you realize it very early in the book and are cheering for them throughout all their ups and downs.The best part of this book is watching Fleur's coming of age and her learning how to become her own person. It's painful to watch, but isn't life like that sometimes.This book was very hard to put down. It is separated into sections going from past to present, and has a great many characters to keep track of. It is a heartwarming story and one of the best book I've read recently.
    • 4/5
      Susan Elizabeth Phillips is the *perfect* beach read, and Glitter Baby is no exception. Breezy but not easy, full of beautiful and terrible people, Glitter Baby follows the career of Fleur Savagar and her chilling and complex relationship with her mother, Belinda.
    • 4/5
      This is the second book I've read about an illegitimate daughter of Errol Fylnn - the other was The Pirate's Daughter. He must have been prodigiously prolific. Fleur is the offspring of Flynn and one of the most unappealing, completely self-centered, mothers I've ever encountered in a book. Along with her mother's husband, Alexi, Belinda qualifies for a most disgusting parent award. But Fleur conquers all - and there is a lot to overcome - to find happiness in true Phillips fashion. A fun time (except for the parents from Hell) with good winning the day.
    • 5/5
      I picked this book up thinking it would be a lighthearted chick lit. Don't be fooled by the title and sparkling cover. Yes, there are some steamy scenes, but they aren't what drive the book. This book chronicles the life of Fleur, a young girl turned lady who has been completely messed up by her delusional mother and conniving "father". There are not a lot of surprises with the twists and turns her life takes, you just know she's going to get screwed (not literally) repeatedly due to her parents. However, it's how the tale unfolds that is interesting. My heart broke for most of the twisted characters in the story. It wasn't what I had signed up for reading, but I had a hard time putting the book down because I was so drawn into Fleur's world.
    • 5/5
      By far the best book Susan Elizabeth Phillips has written. More than a romance, this was a book about a woman surviving the bad choices made by her mother and learning to be true to herself. The characters were complex, both sympathetic and villainous. The plot covered a time period of over thirty years with the ups and downs in the life's of two fascinating female characters.
    • 4/5
      A fabulous story with a lot of depth and emotion. Fantastic!