Scandalous women A novel of Jackie Collins and Jacqueline Susann

Paul's latest historical novel featuring real-life women (after A Beautiful Rival, 2023) focuses on authors Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins, who turned the 1960s publishing world upside down with their best-sellers featuring independent women having sex and the bad men who love them. In 1965, Nancy White arrives in New York, hoping to find a career in publishing. After a humiliating interview, she ends up working with publisher Bernard Geis, who has just received Susann's sophomore novel, Valley of the Dolls, which he thinks is unpublishable but which Nancy champions. Meanwhile, in London, Collins is dealing with a newborn, a failing marriage, and writer's block. Both she and Susann want to write best-sellers to secure their future--Collins for her independence, Susann for her institutionalized autistic son--and they know writing stories women want to read is the way to do it. Alternating perspectives between Nancy and "the two Jackies," Paul spins a tale of sexism, women's empowerment, and Pucci pantsuits, resulting in a lively novel that imagines a glamorous, romantic world while revealing its troubling underbelly.

Paul has created an engaging, innovative, and quicksilver-paced novel about the friendship between two titans of blockbuster fiction, Jacqueline Susann (1918--74) and Jackie Collins (1937--2015), although there is no record of them ever meeting in real life. Fans of both authors will find much to enjoy in this overall historically accurate portrait of two women who wrote sexy, compulsively readable novels and were castigated by critics while appealing to millions of people who didn't previously buy or read books. Paul (who previously fictionalized Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden in A Beautiful Rival) cleverly uses Valley of the Dolls' format of alternating chapters focusing on the three main characters: Jacqueline, Jackie, and Nancy, an ambitious publishing novice who champions and befriends the two authors. Through Nancy, readers meet numerous people who would later inspire characters in Susann and Collins's novels. There is plenty of real-life drama for Paul to empathetically explore, including Susann's cancer battles and financial concern for her son, whose autism she hid, and Collins's troubled first marriage to a man who was biploar and later died by suicide. VERDICT A juicy and fun novel about the women who pioneered the sexy page-turner with Valley of the Dolls and Hollywood Wives.--Kevin Howell