A perceptive and thought-provoking look at the true price of fame & the danger of believing your own hype!
In a celebrity obsessed world, thirty-six-year-old Lara King is at the top of the tree and a global phenomenon if the media are to be believed. With the eyes of the world feasted upon her every move and the adoring public waiting for her to put a foot wrong or utter an ill-judged word, the camera is never off. From her earliest age she has chased the dream and the pursuit of fame, shedding her past without a moments hesitation and fifteen years on from her first taste of the spotlight it has become all too easy to forget the fickle support of fans and the true cost of her stardom. An overnight sensation when she won a reality singer competition in England, only for a drunken moment of madness to leave a stain on her reputation and see the nation’s public drop her like a stone. Vowing to rise again Lara ventures to Los Angeles and disassociates herself from her past to become the embodiment of an earth mother. Her six-year-old daughter, Ava, is all part of that carefully manufactured image and has proved to be a critical component of a golden mother-daughter combination which has generated hordes of fans, a reality show and an array of sponsorship deals.
When a mother-daughter bonding day out in the aftermath of a significant family announcement goes awry and Ava goes missing on a scorching hot day at Laurel Canyon, the media clamours to support Lara and bring Ava home safely. But in no short order the same fans and mass media begin to dissect every aspect of the circumstances surrounding Ava’s disappearance and both the police and Lara’s own entourage soon begin start to pose some potentially very tricky questions that could bring down the whole facade. As fans start to reappraise a woman who they have taken into their hearts and pray for the innocent child caught up in the melee, it threatens to be the undoing of Lara and, in turn, expose the many manipulations of her image that have facilitated her rise to notoriety. In a culture where manipulating the media is all part of the fame game and Lara King has begun to lose sight of her real self, what happens when an element of real life and a potential family tragedy intervenes?
The big announcement should have been a defining moment in Lara King’s career, with the revelation of her engagement to Australian film-star, Matthew Raine, and his adoption of her six-year-old daughter. Instead, just a day later the event was the catalyst for Lara’s lapse of concentration, Ava vanishing and an unprecedented emergency search. The timeline of the novel weaves back and forth between the day of Lara’s big announcement (August 23) to the day of Ava’s disappearance (August 26) and the ensuing search and Lara’s rise (and hasty exit) from England in 2004, and steadily builds momentum to heighten tension.
The narrative is made up of first-person entries in the form of Lara’s own personal thoughts and the unfolding police investigation and the copy of a blogger, purportedly Lara and Ava’s number one fan, whose posts are gaining traction as the media circus surrounding the case ramps up. Rebecca Thornton successfully balances the intimacy of Lara’s deepest feelings and a look behind the celebrity veneer together with depicting a realistic police response. Likewise the conversational tone of the blog posts and the voice Thornton adopts make them wonderfully accessible and highly credible.
A cast of realistically flawed characters, none more so than Lara, generate a pressure cooker atmosphere with several ambiguously portrayed individuals within her own entourage leaving the reader very unsure of just whom to trust. Admittedly I was sceptical about the portrayal of Ava, who at six-years-old seems rather precocious with thought processes and a vocabulary of a much older child, but I can appreciate how her hyper-awareness of the ‘brand’ she is part of from an early age would has exacerbated this.
A riveting psychological thriller that should be required reading in a celebrity obsessed age in which an increasing proportion of the worlds youth regard the pinnacle of success as being a reality star or a social media influencer. A novel of surprising depth with lessons in everything from humility to losing sight of our real selves and staying true to our inner moral compass. Your Guilty Secret is a gripping, painfully believable story with three-dimensional characters and serves as an incisive exploration of the peril of deriving ones self-worth from the adoration of fans and the media.
Kudos to Rebecca Thornton for the slew of corkscrew twists, surprises and frankly shocking revelations in an thoroughly engrossing denouement and the steady unravelling of a superstar with ten percent of the novel still to come. An impressive psychological thriller and a story of real import with home truths that are guaranteed to leave every reader with some profound food for thought.
With thanks to Readers First who provided me with a free copy of this novel in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion.
When a mother-daughter bonding day out in the aftermath of a significant family announcement goes awry and Ava goes missing on a scorching hot day at Laurel Canyon, the media clamours to support Lara and bring Ava home safely. But in no short order the same fans and mass media begin to dissect every aspect of the circumstances surrounding Ava’s disappearance and both the police and Lara’s own entourage soon begin start to pose some potentially very tricky questions that could bring down the whole facade. As fans start to reappraise a woman who they have taken into their hearts and pray for the innocent child caught up in the melee, it threatens to be the undoing of Lara and, in turn, expose the many manipulations of her image that have facilitated her rise to notoriety. In a culture where manipulating the media is all part of the fame game and Lara King has begun to lose sight of her real self, what happens when an element of real life and a potential family tragedy intervenes?
The big announcement should have been a defining moment in Lara King’s career, with the revelation of her engagement to Australian film-star, Matthew Raine, and his adoption of her six-year-old daughter. Instead, just a day later the event was the catalyst for Lara’s lapse of concentration, Ava vanishing and an unprecedented emergency search. The timeline of the novel weaves back and forth between the day of Lara’s big announcement (August 23) to the day of Ava’s disappearance (August 26) and the ensuing search and Lara’s rise (and hasty exit) from England in 2004, and steadily builds momentum to heighten tension.
The narrative is made up of first-person entries in the form of Lara’s own personal thoughts and the unfolding police investigation and the copy of a blogger, purportedly Lara and Ava’s number one fan, whose posts are gaining traction as the media circus surrounding the case ramps up. Rebecca Thornton successfully balances the intimacy of Lara’s deepest feelings and a look behind the celebrity veneer together with depicting a realistic police response. Likewise the conversational tone of the blog posts and the voice Thornton adopts make them wonderfully accessible and highly credible.
A cast of realistically flawed characters, none more so than Lara, generate a pressure cooker atmosphere with several ambiguously portrayed individuals within her own entourage leaving the reader very unsure of just whom to trust. Admittedly I was sceptical about the portrayal of Ava, who at six-years-old seems rather precocious with thought processes and a vocabulary of a much older child, but I can appreciate how her hyper-awareness of the ‘brand’ she is part of from an early age would has exacerbated this.
A riveting psychological thriller that should be required reading in a celebrity obsessed age in which an increasing proportion of the worlds youth regard the pinnacle of success as being a reality star or a social media influencer. A novel of surprising depth with lessons in everything from humility to losing sight of our real selves and staying true to our inner moral compass. Your Guilty Secret is a gripping, painfully believable story with three-dimensional characters and serves as an incisive exploration of the peril of deriving ones self-worth from the adoration of fans and the media.
Kudos to Rebecca Thornton for the slew of corkscrew twists, surprises and frankly shocking revelations in an thoroughly engrossing denouement and the steady unravelling of a superstar with ten percent of the novel still to come. An impressive psychological thriller and a story of real import with home truths that are guaranteed to leave every reader with some profound food for thought.
With thanks to Readers First who provided me with a free copy of this novel in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion.