Check out my blog for the full review at Rachel Blogs.

This book wasn't much, it's easily forgettable and not something I'll go out of my way to recommend, and the synopsis was super misleading. This was much more "privileged white girl goes and experiences Mexican culture because someone might want to kill her" than a thriller with twists and turns. I never really felt like her life was in danger, and I was never really concerned that she would make it out alive. I figured out the majority of the "twists" ahead of time, but I really thought this was going to be a way more suspenseful book. It wasn't that witty either as the synopsis says, it just was kind of blah all over.

A line pops into my head, one I repeated dozens of times to get the right balance of hope and desperation that the Zombie Killer is known for. All that stands between me and the end of the world...is a bobby pin.

I have two, motherfuckers.

Vaya con dios, mi amigo.

No, that's not a quote from the book. It's my advice to you, it means "go with god, my friend," and you're going to need that advice should you insist upon reading this book.

It's one of those so-bad-it's-almost-good books.

It's insta-love, and that's pretty much it. We have omg HE'S SUCH AN ASSHOLE and YOU ARE A FUCKING MORONIC PRINCESS and then 5 seconds later I LOVE HIM. What the fuck.

Ok, so here's kind of a spoiler, but not really. The book is entitled Vivian Divine is Dead. I know that this is huge news. Shocking. Absolutely flabbergasting, jaw-dropping, and all of that good shit but Vivian Divine doesn't die.

I wish she had. The book might have been more interesting otherwise.

The Summary:

I try not to think about the day Pierre and I first fell in love. It was a year ago, when we were wrapping up Zombie Killer, my blockbuster about an orphan who saves the human race.

Sure, Vivian Divine may be a famous Hollywood movie star, Oscar-nominated by age 16, with a famous director father and the 3rd most beautiful (and very dead) mother (as chosen by Time magazine), but as far as she's concerned, everything in her life has been about the movie Zombie Killer.

But no really, her life kind of sucks right now because:

1. Mommy is dead, from MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES

2. Daddy tried to kill himself from ZE PAIN

3. Her boyfriend, Pierre, just cheated on her with her much skinner best friend, Sparrow (not much of a best friend anymore!). Her heart is totally, irretrievably broken.

Pierre was the only one who could make me feel better, and the only boy who ever whispered, This is forever.

Oh yeah, and um.

4. Someone's sending her death threats. Hence the title of the book. Vivian Divine really, really thinks she's going to die.

And apparently, shit, it's true! People are trying to kill her! What's the poor Vivian Divine to do? She's never attended school, she's never done a single fucking thing for herself.

I hate asking for help. Luckily, I never have to. A team of specialists is paid to take care of my every need, to anticipate what I might want and have it prepared ahead of time. If they don’t have the right brand of mango lip balm ready for me after a shoot, they’re done.

So Vivian Divine is totally fucked when her only way of escaping CERTAIN DOOM is to escape to Mexico!

Ay, caramba! (I know there's supposed to be another exclamation mark before the Ay, but I'm too tired to look it up in Character Map, ok?)

So with a mysterious, awesome new disguise---you know how when you go incognito, you're supposed to look plain and all that good shit so that you don't attract attention?

I’m normally cute: big blue eyes, pouty lips, long copper curls. But this is gorgeous. My short black hair falls straight and glossy as a waterfall; my eyes are melting chocolate.

Someone forgot to tell Vivian Divine.

But it's ok, because the instant she meets trouble...Vivian Divine falls into insta-love.

Standing in front of me is the sexiest guy I’ve ever seen. His eyes are a rugged green, his black hair shaggy on his shoulders. His cargo pants hang off his slim hips, and a white undershirt clings to his chest. My personal trainer would kill for his body.

“Hola.” I’m completely tongue-tied.

Nick is instantly contemptuous of her. This spoiled little princess who is clearly out of her league in the wilds of México. Such a fool. What could this toughened, experienced, battle-weary boy ever see in Hollywood Royalty Vivian Divine?

“You’re a spoiled brat. You have no problems,” Nick says. “You think your life’s so tough, but your rich mommy and daddy take care of everything for you.” He snatches my orange soda from my hand, takes the last sip, and tosses it into the trash. “You don’t know what real pain is.”

Uh huh! YOU TELL HER, NICK! Don't let that prissy little princess worm her way into her heart. And true to his words, Nick holds steady for all of 5 seconds.

“When I met you on the bus, I thought you were just another rich American,” he continues. “But you’re not. You’re...different.”

OH, NO, NOT THE D WORD!!!!!!!!

But the romance aside, THERE'S STILL PEOPLE TRYING TO KILL VIVIAN DIVINE. Even in Mexico! But it's all good, Vivian Divine was in Zombie Killer, remember? Her experience from Zombie Killer not only helps her endure wearing contacts when she's donning her disguise...

[She] finds me a pair of brown contacts, which I’m used to wearing, thanks to my months of demon-red contacts in Zombie Killer.

And helps her tolerate hunger during her days on the run in Mexico.

I’ve never been this hungry before (except for all-night shoots for Zombie Killer.

But it helps Vivian to prove herself to Nick when he's being an asshat to her.

Anger races through me, and I remember the judo move I learned for the all-night shoot of Zombie Killer. I’ll show you petty problems.

And it helps her to protect herself against the BAD BAD GUYS. Vivian is trapped in a moving car? It's all good. She can jump out of the car if she needs to, thanks to her experience with Zombie Killer.

I’ve done it before. I jumped out of a moving car for a stunt in Zombie Killer.

If someone tries to attack her, it's all good, because she's learned judo on the set of Zombie Killer.

What if someone jumps out and attacks me? What do I do? I try to recall the judo moves I learned for Zombie Killer.

If she needs encouragement...Vivian can just remember her mother's words of advice...for acting in Zombie Killer.

I remember my mom telling me the day before she disappeared, when I was filming the fight scene for Zombie Killer. In that scene, when the zombies had me almost beaten, the Zombie Killer realized that sometimes not fighting is as powerful as fighting.

MEXICO JA JA JA: The Mexico portrayed in this book can best be described in one word: stupid. People can eat rodents if they need to. There are fucking mariachi bands everywhere. They eat tacos every meal of the day. They eat cricket tacos. They speak in complete English sentences...but certain words have to constantly be in Spanish. A guy can speak for an entire paragraph in fluent English, but when he refers to his mother, it's always mi madre . Come on, now.

Divinely Insipid:

Hiding from a killer with an armed stranger in Mexico? Am I crazy?

Yes, yes you are.

Vivian Divine is Hollywood Royalty, which is the synonym for I have no common sense whatsoever outside of what I learned in movies. She has spent her entire life as an actor. She has never been to school. Her parents are famous and wealthy. She has always been waited on hand and foot. She doesn't know what it's like to be in the real world, so when she gets immersed into it, into the wilds of Mexico, of all things, she drowns. It takes a big, strong man to protect her, because Vivian Divine can't do jack shit.

All her experience is gleaned from movies. She sees a fucking house. It looks like a house in [insert movie here] that she's been in. It happens repeatedly. To Vivian, Mexico looks like a movie set.

I’ve seen this church before, I realize, on the studio’s back lot. It’s the “Traditional Mafia Church” set.

To Vivian, everything that happens is the equivalent of a movie scene.

It feels like my story’s ending. It’s a story with a tragic ending, one where the heroine starves to death on the side of a mountain, all alone, with only a lamb to keep her company.

And I must be frank, there's no other way to put it. Vivian Divine, by rights, should have died because she is a fucking moron who wouldn't last 1.5 seconds in downtown LA, much less Mexico.

The Romance: For someone who falls into insta-love so quickly, Vivian Divine can't forget about her ex-boyfriend, Pierre.

His eyes seem to breathe me in, all of me, not just little useful pieces like Pierre’s used to do. But maybe I’m just imagining it.

I expect Nick to look confused, like Pierre did when I told him, but he’s nodding like he understands.

If Pierre was here, he’d pretend he knew how to do it, burn himself, and then make me start the fire.

It’s the complete opposite of Pierre’s bathroom, which is stuffed with expensive colognes and hair gel, but then again, Pierre has more beauty products than I do.

I know all about sleeping pills. Pierre takes them to get a few hours of sleep before his shoots so that he won’t have bags under his eyes.

All this happens throughout the book. She is constantly thinking about Pierre and comparing/contrasting them. Enough already. And then not a few days passes before Vivian Divine realizes...

I see your soul, I want to say, but I bite my tongue, and hope he sees mine.

The insta-love is terrible. Nick hated her in the beginning, and then for no reason at all, they start to fall in love right after she tells him the equivalent of I'M NOT AS SHALLOW AS YOU THINK I AM, without any proof, without any character development whatsoever. And before you know it, this happens.

“Nobody knows,” Nick says. “But when the locals look at them, they see angels.”
“What do you see?”
“Something even better,” Nick says, looking right at me.

God won't help you. Watch a telenovela instead.

Did I ever mention I wanted to write soap operas…

I’m sure I did.

This book is what gives soaps a bad name.  In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen a soap opera that is this messed up since the network was purposely trying to cancel All My Children and they had Dixie die by tainted pancakes.

God, that was a horrible storyline.

Vivian Divine read like that era of daytime television that many people have tried to forget its existence.  To be honest, I wasn’t planning on giving this book such a low rating, but the last act and its borderline offensive tone kept me from giving it a passable rating.

Yeah, based on the summary I should’ve known what I was getting into.  But I expected the book to be zany fun.  Instead of culturally offensive melodrama.

And yes, I said culturally offensive since its views on Mexico were…well, borderline offensive (to me at least).  I’m from Texas and the Mexican culture plays a large part of the culture here.  Unlike Vivian, I was well aware of what the day of the dead was.  What basic Mexican cuisine is.  And I can ask what is your name in Spanish without making an ass of myself.

Given that Southern California has a huge Mexican population too, you’d think Vivian wouldn’t be so shocked with Mexican culture.  But nope.  Girl treats the country like it’s a third world country.  I think Sabel wanted sort of a Romancing the Stone effect  which was why she had Vivian act like such an ignoramus, but here’s the deal, Joan Wilder tried to absorb her culture to some degree and she had a right to be annoyed with Michael Douglass, he destroyed her expensive heels.  Nick, he didn’t destroy Vivian’s shoes.  Though he was a big little bit of a chauvinistic jerk.

Add the fact that their relationship is spurred by insta love….

You have a very annoyed reader.

That’s not even the worst thing about this book.

I could look over these things-well, not so much the culturally offensive part because in a genre that it so WASP filled as YA any time there’s some sort of potential to diversity I get really upset when it ends up like this-the book gets worse though.

That’s in its third act that makes little or no sense.

At least soap operas sort of build up to their ridiculous twists.  Look at General Hospital.  As ridiculous as their polonium poisoning story was, Ron Carlivati (the head writer of the show) built up the storyline enough so I could at least sort of buy it.  Here though, there’s no build up.  Revelations are just thrown at you.  I think some people might argue that it’s just a part of the style that the book is written in, but no…just no…you have to have some build up.  Even if you want to do a plot that’s dirty and fast.

It probably didn’t help that while some revelations came out of nowhere, some were just so obvious you had to laugh at the stupidity of the main character.  Serious.  Run away from Mexico because you believe the FBI and police are after you for no apparent reason when you know absolutely no Spanish. And have no survival skills.

Really?

Really?

Do you see the stupidity of this?

If you don’t then I worry about your survival on this planet.

Overall, this one just didn’t work for me.  Maybe if I wasn’t so cerebral when I read, I could enjoy this one more.  But at the same time, anyone who has half a brain and knows anything about Mexican culture is likely to get annoyed.  The best thing I can say about this book is I got to practice my Spanish reading skills by trying to translate all the Spanish that Vivian didn’t understand.  Given that most of this is elementary Spanish, that’s really not saying much.

Overall Rating: F.  Yeah, it fails.  This MC is just too dumb to function and The Three Amigos  portrays Mexico better than this book.

This review is also available on my blog, Bows & Bullets Reviews

Vivian Divine is a teen acting star who has received a very serious death threat. Now, she's on the run in Mexico with only her wits to keep her alive until she meets Nick, a guy who is the polar opposite of Hollywood boys. He's kind and genuine and seems to be determined to help Vivian. But with the baddies closing in are these two enough to take on the big bad and live to tell the tale? Or will Vivian get murdered as predicted?

Vivian has been depressed since her mother was murdered six months ago. She is just going through the motions, acting and spending time with her Hollywood Hotshot boyfriend, until he cheats on her with her best friend. This pushes her deeper into depression and when the death threat surfaces, she doesn't need much of push to run off to a Mexican safe house. Things don't go according to plan, when her money gets stolen within the first bus ride and that stupid Mexican boy Nick mocking her. And soon she feels the bad guy hot on her trail and makes a break for it by running off into the woods with Nick. I had a bit of a love/hate relationship with her because you have to sympathize with what she's lost, but she is so damn naive I wanted to slap her.

I had the same type of Love/hate thing going with Nick. On one hand, he's sweet and charming, but it's clear he's hiding something. He's not being 100% honest and it irked me through the entire book...until you get close to the end where it's painfully obvious what his secret is. I can't be the only one who predicted that. I also can't be the only one who predicted the Mary thing. That was a big problem I had with this novel, it's very predictable. I saw every twist coming, every single one.

The writing was great and fast paced and interesting, but the basic story line was muddled. And fully of instalove! Nick and Vivian spend just a few days together and though there is attraction, I didn't feel like there was enough for them to claim "love" before the scant 280 pages were up. I can buy into falling in love in a few days if they are an intense few days. In The Taking by Kimberly Derting, the main two characters only have a few days to fall in love, but it was an intense few days and while Vivian's time with Nick was meant to feel intense, it falls short. Every time she thinks something about loving him, I was rolling my eyes. I found her antics a bit over the top. But, assuming the author did want me to believe her love was real, then she is in for a nasty surprise. Things with Nick don't end well. Things with Nick end rather badly. Don't go into this with the expectation that they will ride off into the sunset because they won't. And, as if you really need reminding at this point, I hate bad endings. So you can imagine my reaction...and if you can't




All you really need to know is that I found this disappointing. I wanted to love it. I love the cover and it's got a great premise, with a prissy actress having to rough it in Mexico, but it just fell flat. The story was funny and charming, but it didn't have the heart to back it up, if that makes sense. It's like a hot guy with no personality whatsoever. It builds up to an epically predictable climax and then it just ends. There is no falling action or time to recover from the climax, it's just over. I feel like that's happening a lot in the novels I've read recently. ACTION and then it's over. Maybe you'll see more here than I did, but I didn't love it like I thought I would.

****Thank you to Katherine Tegen Books for providing me with an eARC via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review****

***This review has also been posted on The Social Potato

Vivian Divine is Dead is so bad that it’s almost comical. I was craughing after finishing it. No joke. With its clichés and "coincidences", this book is like a big fat joke. This is something that would be a million times better on TV than on paper. When you write a book, it’s important you close all the loop holes or at least attempt to. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen in this book. What we have here instead are dramatic twists that are so predictable they just make you want to bang your head on a wall.

Vivian Divine came from a perfect family. Her mother was voted Hollywood’s most beautiful woman 3 times in a row. Her dad's one of the best directors in Hollywood and she herself was the youngest person to be nominated for an Oscar. She had a perfect boyfriend and a beautiful best friend (throw in some self-image issues, too, when she compares herself to her bff) but then her mother died (6 months before the start of the novel) and her father tried to commit suicide. They are trapped in a bubble of grief and no one can seem to catch a break. Her boyfriend cheats on her with her best friend (there’s that trope), her life is in danger (ooh, another one) and now she must go on the run (YAY! Another one, too).

The one thing extremely off with the situation is how her bodyguard lets her go off on her own into the wild without any backup. NO ONE lets celebs go on the run on their own, never mind a celeb who's not even an adult (she is like 16!). I cannot believe Vivian never questioned that. She must have lived a VERY sheltered life.

Which is kind of evident from the fact that Vivian doesn’t even understand the seriousness of the situation she is in. The police may or may not be trying to hunt her down and she is on her way to another country to take refuge, yet she still manages to be self-important and goes around expecting everything to be handed to her on a silver platter. Welcome to the real world, hon. But you know what? She is not ‘that’ bad; she realizes that the real world is completely different because like there are people who go to churches with enough gold to buy Beverly Hills but cannot afford to buy shoes. So, so sad. *sigh*

Vivian Divine also feels like people owe her. She commands people to help her, strangers that have no obligation to do so but should because she ‘wants’ them to.  *shakes head*. She is a flip flop of a character. I cannot actually decide what the author wants us to feel. Are we supposed to like her or are we supposed to be annoyed? Hell, what does Vivian even want herself? I GOT NO IDEA because she cannot make her bloody mind.

The author tries to create a contrast between the environment and where our main character comes from, but the author takes it to the extreme, like to the extreme-extreme. It’s kind of ridiculous.

Her family is surprisingly normal (like before everything went down the shitter) and I have no idea how I feel about that. On one hand it's a positive portrayal of  families and doesn't follow the 'bad parents' stereotype (except her dad is overworked and doesn't give her enough time) but on the other hand, I feel like it just seems so weird that they are these famous Hollywood people and yet they appear extremely normal. This could be a result of my own bias but I definitely found the normalcy somewhat odd.

That wasn't the only thing that struck me as odd, though - the romance was off-the-charts weird. It was horrible. For the first day there seems to be hope that you might see a somewhat developed romance, but then the next day the L words are thought and it’s just like a wtf moment. This book has a tendency to make you go:



Chloe would look pretty damn awesome as the cover of the book. That also happened to be my reaction to the plot.Plot? What plot? This is a soap opera with dramatic twists that can be seen coming from MILES away. It’s not so much unpredictable as it is question mark inducing.

Vivan seems to arrive at the right places and strangers always seem willing to help her. She even compares this to how ‘back home’ people won’t help an old lady cross the road and everyone seems to be nice here. Wait, wait, hold on a second; is this supposed to be the real world because where the fuck is the real world? COINCIDENCES LIKE THESE DON’T HAPPEN.

With all that said, the ending was actually pretty nice. I said that. Go ahead. Throw stuff at me (I have a tendency to do this). I was surprised by it but it did nothing to redeem the book. The book still sucked and I wished I could have my time back.

In all honesty, I really wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone. It’s a waste of time and unless you’re really bored and cannot find any books to read, skip this and read something that’s been on your shelf since the dawn of time.