Diary of a South Beach Party Girl
-
-
4.8 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
South Beach in the late 1990s is a town of blink-and-you'll-miss-'em nightclubs populated by celebrities, models, mobsters, heiresses, drug dealers, drag queens, and fun seekers of all stripes. It's a place where the famous come to party like locals, the locals party like rock stars behind velvet ropes, and the press is savvy enough to know what not to report.
Rachel Baum is a sheltered, career-oriented everygirl when she moves to South Beach from her quiet Miami suburb, searching for a life less ordinary. Quickly making friends among SoBe's most exclusive scenesters, she spends her days building a career and her nights building a reputation. But in a town where friends become enemies faster than highs become hangovers, the life less ordinary turns into more than Rachel bargained for. As she pursues the endless party in penthouses, dive bars, after-hours clubs, and cocaine speakeasies, Rachel struggles to balance her goals and ambitions with the decadence and excess -- especially her drug-fueled, on-again off-again relationship with Yale-graduate-turned-addict John Hood -- that threaten to destroy everything she's always worked for.
With tremendous wit and razor-sharp insight, Diary of a South Beach Party Girl portrays the innermost sanctums of South Beach's privileged Beautiful People through the eyes of a no longer innocent heroine.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her debut novel, former party girl Cooper smartly focuses on the fringe freaks who fueled the nightlife in the nauseatingly hip late 1990s South Beach: ber-publicist Ricky Pascal, petulant heiress Amy, sexy felon John Hood and a host of bar workers and bar hoppers who hobnob with the rich even as they scramble to make their own rent. Rachel Baum poet, aspiring publicist and hard-partying diva narrates the frenetic scene from a prime VIP-room seat. The air kissing, photo-ops and drug-and-liquor indulging is the price of admission to the much more subtle seduction of Rachel and her entourage. "South Beach was a town in the business of seduction," Rachel notes. "Sometimes the sheer, overwhelming beauty of the place and its inhabitants was so sharp, it was almost painful." Rachel's love affair with the South Beach party scene ends when her search for "stability versus chaos" takes precedence over the addictive charm of a community that so readily forgives and forgets every destructive bender she (and everyone else) goes on. But it hardly matters: South Beach and all of its neon-vodka-narcotic glamour is a much better draw than the predictable mellowing of a party chick.
Customer Reviews
U
On his part now that