My Thoughts on “Hollywood Nobody” by Lisa Samson

Hollywood Nobody

First, I am NOT the target demographic for this type of book. This story is written for teen and pre-teen girls and contains a lot of references to pop culture. Now I’m a thirty something ex-pat who wasn’t really interested in pop culture even when I lived in the states.

Still, I enjoyed this book and that is saying something because, based on the stats above, I am not the normal reader of this genre. So, I think that teenage girls will enjoy this book even more than I did.

Some of my thoughts:

One, I would encourage you parents out there to read this along with your teens (or pre-teens). It gives some great topics for discussion. My mom was special :) and I remember many of the discussions that we had about books and films over the years. They were great growing and critical thinking opportunities for me.

The main character, Scotty, was fun and engaging. Scotty is not a Christian but interacts with different believers and church situations that she encounters on the road. I appreciate the honest perspective of seeing real people being loving, caring examples of Jesus, as well as those encounters that she perceived as an act or a performance. It created a great reminder that as believers we need to be transparent, genuine and real with others.

There were times that the story seemed to jerk away from something without rounding out the thought. I think that this was generally done on purpose. The author introduces things, for example the characters from “The Great Gatsby,” without ever telling the storyline. This happens again when the author brings in John Wesley as Scotty’s “new hero” but explains very little, at that point, about Wesley or why Scotty would think of him as a hero. I believe that the intention to get readers to “google” these things for themselves to learn more about them, but I’m not really sure that most readers would do so. Although it is a good opportunity for parents to interact with their kids, prompting them to do some research, I would have liked to have seen a better, more well rounded description of the topics that were introduced.

The only other thing that gave me pause was that while reading the book I started getting the impression that the teenager actually knew more and had more sense than the adult. Now I am not discounting that this can happen in the world, but I dislike the way the media often belittles authority and makes authority figures, such as parents, out to be incompetent. Now this particular story is told from the teenager’s point of view and in the end we see that there were events in play that she knew nothing about. So eventually we see that Charley (the parent) was acting on information that, when discovered, put her actions into perspective. So while she isn't a perfect parent figure, she isn't made out to be completely imcompetent either, which I appreciated. She was portrayed as a parent struggling to do the best she could in a difficult situation. This is another great topic for discussion and includes food for thought on the parent’s right to withhold information (or even lying) for the sake of protecting their child, the results of a child’s lies to the parent (for the sake of independence) and the overall consequences that secrets and lies have on relationships.

Overall, I think Hollywood Nobody is a great book full of fun characters that raises some interesting discussion points for teens.