Review: Advika and the Hollywood Wives

Advika and the Hollywood Wives by Kirthana Ramisetti
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

One of the things I find that is making this a difficult book to follow is that the time frame for this book is a bit wonky- I thought it was 2022 or 2023 - apparently, I was wrong. And had I done a better job of reading the book's description, I would have known this LOL! This would be why Juliians' age was not as old as I thought it was.

I kept reading this novel because I had hoped it would improve. I also wanted to know why Advika was left with that odd proposal in one of the wives will. But you know what? It never did. What this book did to me was to wind me up, and I kept hoping that the ending would be worth it, but it wasn't.
Frankly, I knew just by how the characters were badly written and ego-driven, the conversations stilted, and the plot line unbelievable that there would be no wonderful ending, not even an ah-ha moment.

I had never met two such unlikeable protagonists in my life. Advika whining, immature, and spineless. Julian - well, he was just plain crazy, and nobody ever even noticed?

*ARC supplied by the publisher Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley.

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SYNOPSIS: "Advika Srinivasan never thought she’d be someone’s fourth wife, let alone the new wife of Julian Zelding, one of Hollywood’s most renowned film producers—a gripping tale of marriage, ambition, and power from the author of GMA Book Club pick Dava Shastri's Last Day.

At age 26, Advika Srinivasan considers herself a failed screenwriter. To pay the bills and keep her mind off of the recent death of her twin sister, she’s taken to bartending A-list events, including the 2015 Governors Ball, the official afterparty of the Oscars. There, in a cinematic dream come true, she meets the legendary Julian Zelding—a film producer as handsome as Paul Newman and ten times as powerful—fresh off his fifth best picture win. Despite their 41-year age difference, Advika falls helplessly under his spell, and their evening flirtation ignites into a whirlwind courtship and elopement. Advika is enthralled by Julian’s charm and luxurious lifestyle, but while Julian loves to talk about his famous friends and achievements, he smoothly changes the subject whenever his previous relationships come up. Then, a month into their marriage, Julian’s first wife—the famous actress Evie Lockhart—dies, and a tabloid reports a shocking stipulation in her will. A single film reel and $1,000,000 will be bequeathed to “Julian’s latest child bride” on one condition: Advika must divorce him first.

Shaken out of her love fog and still-simmering grief over the loss of her sister—and uneasy about Julian’s sudden, inexplicable urge to start a family—Advika decides to investigate him through the eyes and experiences of his exes. From reading his first wife’s biography, to listening to his second wife’s confessional albums, to watching his third wife’s Real Housewives-esque reality show, Advika starts to realize how little she knows about her husband. Realizing she rushed into the marriage for all the wrong reasons, Advika uses the info gleaned from the lives of her husband’s exes to concoct a plan to extricate herself from Julian once and for all."