Rating: WARTY!
If I’d known that Kirkus said of this: "Deliciously catty and immediately engrossing" I would never have pulled it off the library shelf. Kirkus pretty much never read a book they didn’t gush over, so their reviews are essentially useless, and I actively avoid books they recommend even if they sound interesting from the blurb. I didn't know beforehand that they'd praised this one. If I had, it would have saved me the time listening to it. Or perhaps, in this case, even had I known their take on it, I might still have got it because the big attraction for me was that it was read by Christina Ricci. After having fallen in love with her watching the Netflix Lizzie Borden movie and subsequent miniseries, I was severely disappointed to discover that her reading voice sucks! It’s a drab and monotonous voice which would have made even an exciting novel dreary, but in this case, the material she was reading was as bad as her reading voice proved to be.
Gossip Girl is purportedly about " a wickedly funny and risqué original novel about the provocative lives of New York City's most prestigious private school young adults", but in reality, it's about shallow mid-teens going about their spoiled-rotten but unutterably shallow and uninteresting lives. There is no "Sharp wit," no "intriguing characters," and no "high stakes", but there is oodles of cheap and boring "melodrama."
This audiobook was a waste of petroleum products. The best thing I can say about it is that it was abridged. If it had been abridged to "Chapter One The End" it would have been perfect.
