Hello, Hollywood! - review

Hello, Hollywood! is the second in Janice Thompson's Backstage Pass series. It offers a behind-the-scenes look at a fictional popular sitcom. I enjoyed the first book in the series, Stars Collide, so I was interested to read more of the continuing story. While the story in Stars Collide was about the actors in the sitcom, Hello, Hollywood! features the writers of the show. Being interested in writing, I found that fascinating. I liked how they set up their writing room to resemble the set on the Dick VanDyke Show for inspiration. It's too bad that real sitcoms are no longer clean and family-friendly like the one portrayed in this novel. Still, it's fun to pretend they are!

Here's the publisher's synopsis:

Popular romance author and screenwriter, Janice Thompson, is charming her readers once again with a behind-the-scenes look at life in Hollywood. This time, Thompson takes her readers inside the writer’s room.

At 28, Athena Pappas has a pretty great gig. She’s the head writer of one of the most popular sitcoms in television history, Stars Collide. Yet, something’s still lacking: her love life.

Athena finds nothing wrong with still living at home with her large, wacky Greek family and making her bed with the same Strawberry Shortcake sheets she had as a kid. None of that has prevented Athena from plotting her characters’ romances. So why is her own love life so hard to script?

Athena’s love life gets the shakeup it needs when her boss hires up-and-coming Vegas comedian, Stephen Cosse, to help boost the show’s sagging ratings. Feeling her position as head writer threatened, she starts to doubt her talents, and the fact that Stephen is as good looking as Adonis doesn’t escape Athena’s attention either.

Sparks fly as the competition—and attraction—between the two heats things up. While they struggle to create conflict and comedy for their characters on the page, Athena and Stephen develop a relationship they never would have scripted for themselves and discover that not being in control of the plot of their lives may just be the best thing that’s ever happened.

Available September 2011 at your favorite bookseller from Revell, a division of Baker Publishing Group. Thank you to Revell for providing me with a review copy.