Super Star: Olivia’s Story

* Photo credit to The Closet *

Olivia Davidson actually looks like a teenage girl. Unfortunately, there’s something about her whole face that makes me want to punch it. Quit making that gross smile! I like her beaded bracelet though. At least she has that going for her.

BTW: What makes Olivia so damned important that we need to hear her story? This book does not answer this.

Olivia is taking oil painting classes, where she meets a sexy artist named James Yates, who makes “solid and self-assured” abstract paintings and he is the epitome of a starving artist: He has nothing but tea bags in his cupboards and he is too cheap to even buy himself a new mug when the handle breaks off his old one. He’s just too deep for that! They throw around all these fancy art terms at a hipster coffee shop before he takes her back to his scarcely decorated hovel, and they sit on his fire escape and James tells her he just wants to be friends because he doesn’t believe in love—he just believes in art and truth. (“I’m not even sure whether love is real or if it’s just something our culture made up.”) Then he smears oil paint all over her face. But his words have fallen on deaf ears! Olivia’s already in love, even though James seems way too into himself and is totally pretentious. (He wants to paint the homeless.)

Olivia’s cousin Emily comes to stay with them because she’s looking at colleges in California, and she’s so opposite of Olivia that Olivia can’t even possibly imagine them ever being friends: Emily’s just so organized: She dresses like a junior executive and color codes her files! But Emily’s super-tidy life makes Olivia reexamine her own and realize that she needs to start buckling down and do only practical things that matter, like work at Simpson’s department store, create realistic-looking art that people can actually understand, and not dress like a Deadhead.

At her new job, Olivia meets Robert Simpson, the boss’ son, who is sophisticated, intelligent, and boringly normal. He—a “private-school-and-tennis-lessons kind of boy”—gets Olivia a Filofax planner for Christmas and picks out her ordinary wardrobe. Olivia dates him, thinking that she should like someone practical, for the sake of her poor parents. Emily, however, explores her wild side by dressing like Olivia and going to hang out with James, whom she finds “exciting” because he’s so different from her. But when she lets it slip that Olivia is seeing Robert, James gets all moody (even moodier, really!) and Emily realizes that James is actually hot for Liv.

But Olivia and James fight over her new look and outlook on life and the fact that she gives him a paperweight for Christmas. (Every teen in this book needs a lesson in age-appropriate gift giving.) But she has a talk with her mom, who confesses she gave up life as an artist for a career in middle-management, and Olivia decides to keep it real. She gives James an abstract painting she’d been working on, and he in turn shows her two portraits of her he’d painted on a brick building: one depicts her free spirit, and the other shows her straight-and-narrow side. Then he admits he’s into her and they smooch. But it’s sort of lame, because I don’t feel like Olivia really taught James anything about himself, and he’s just going to go on thinking that being a pretentious bum is cool.

There’s this side story about Liz and Jess getting part-time jobs at Simpson’s department store that just goes nowhere. Liz is a bitch in the interview process. (She thinks Jess is stupid for being nice to the receptionist just because the receptionist wouldn’t be hiring them [“All that charm going to waste”] and then doesn’t even try to act excited about the job when she’s talking to the hiring manager [“All I want to do right now is earn some extra money for Christmas presents”].) Jess tries to score with Robert Simpson but fails. That’s seriously it.

Other Notes:

• Olivia holds her hair back with a 45-rpm record. Dear God.
• Emily’s idea of a soulmate: “Someone with real job security.” Dear God some mor

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