A Star is Bored – Mini Review

Author: Byron Lane

Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Publisher: Henry Holt & Company

Publication Date: July 28, 2020

Book Description: She needs an assistant.
He needs a hero.

A hilariously heartfelt novel influenced in part by the author’s time assisting Carrie Fisher.

Charlie Besson is tense and sweating as he prepares for a wild job interview. His car is idling, like his life, outside the Hollywood mansion of Kathi Kannon, star of stage and screen and People magazine’s Worst Dressed list. She’s an actress in need of assistance, and he’s adrift and in need of a lifeline.

Kathi is an icon, bestselling author, and award-winning movie star, most known for her role as Priestess Talara in a blockbuster sci-fi film. She’s also known in another role: Outrageous Hollywood royalty. Admittedly so. Famously so. Chaotically so, as Charlie quickly discovers. 

Charlie gets the job, and his three-year odyssey is filled with late-night shopping sprees, last-minute trips to see the aurora borealis, and an initiation to that most sacred of Hollywood tribes: the personal assistant. But Kathi becomes much more than a boss, and as their friendship grows Charlie must make a choice. Will he always be on the sidelines of life, assisting the great forces that be, or can he step into his own life’s leading role?

Laugh-out-loud funny, and searingly poignant, Byron Lane’s A Star is Bored is a novel that, like the star at its center, is enchanting and joyous, heartbreaking and hopeful.

Rating: 3 1/2 Stars

Review: This is the story of Charlie, who is looking to change his mundane life. He interviews and accepts a position as a personal assistant to a Hollywood Star Kathi Kannon, who has become sort of a “has-been”. We spend the next 3 years looking into their relationship.

There is a lot going in the debut novel. There is a lot of humor, but this does veer into some very heavy topics, of mental-illness and drug use. What you get a deeper story than I expected of these two very different people and the bond that they come to have.

Overall, this was a pretty strong debut. The author, wrote a very fast paced novel that you will not want to put down.

Thank you NetGalley and Henry Holt & Company for an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.