Amazon Slate - the Debut Novel by Brian Rowe Category:  Women Publisher: CreateSpace ISBN-10:  1460971515 Type: Fiction Pages: 316 Copyright: March 13, 2011 ISBN-13: 9781460971512 A mischievous Hollywood casting director uses her job for sex! Hollywood casting director Vivien Slate thought she had it all, until coming home one day to find her husband cheating on her with a younger woman. With her marriage on the rocks, she decides it’s the perfect time to recapture her sexual identity... by finding a younger man of her own.  Vivien realizes she has a dating service right inside her own office—she’s a casting director, after all. She devises a scenario to make the town believe her newest film project is as real as any other. She populates the cast with male characters spanning the ages of twenty to forty and begins holding auditions with hundreds of Tinseltown’s most eligible bachelors.  Vivien stops at nothing to find her perfect younger man, even if it means leaving her morals behind and ultimately putting her life in danger. Excerpt Vivien stormed through her house, from the bedroom to the living room, from the kitchen to the laundry room. She opened the back door and stepped out into the violent sun. She saw them first in shadow, bouncing up and down, like something one would see in an old Looney Tunes cartoon. She blinked a few times, and then pinched her left arm just to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. Patrick was naked in the Jacuzzi. He was having sex—wild, animalistic sex—with a young woman who looked no older than thirty. His secretary. “Oh yeah!” the girl in the Jacuzzi shouted. “Oh Patrick! Oh yeah! Harder! Harder!” “Call me Doctor!” He was seated like the lazy man he was, and she was riding him for all his old achy bones were worth. “Yes! Doctor! Oh, Doctor! I love it!” The sex got rougher as the seconds turned to minutes. Vivien stood near the laundry room door like an illicit voyeur, not knowing if she was supposed to stop the proceedings or just start fingering herself. When the nausea started to kick in, Vivien knew she had to stop standing there. She started walking toward the Jacuzzi, her legs feeling like they weighed five hundred pounds. As she stomped closer toward the whirlpool of sweat and semen, she felt like she was having an out-of-body experience. This can’t be happening. This isn’t happening. But it was happening. Her husband of nineteen years was cheating on her right in front of her with his own secretary. And there was nothing she could do about it. She felt lightheaded, and she could start to feel the vomit inching its way up her windpipe. “Fuckin’ fucker,” Vivien said. The young woman turned toward her and screamed. Patrick jerked his right arm to his left out of surprise and tipped over the bottle of wine. Red bloody liquid started gushing from the bottle toward Vivien’s feet. “Vivien!” Patrick shouted. “What are you doing home!” Vivien wasn’t thinking. She tilted her body down and dug her sharp fingernails into his armpits. She got a good grip and, with every ounce of her being, dragged him out of the spa and onto the hot cement. “Owwww!” he screamed. She kept pulling him, even when his feet weren’t close to touching water anymore. She scraped his neck, back, and buttocks against the cement. He was in tears. His blood started to mix in with the wine to form a substance that looked like the remnants of a cherry smoothie. Vivien looked at her husband’s mistress with venomous eyes. “Get the fuck out of my house!” The girl was already leaping out of the spa and running toward the side gate before Vivien had finished her sentence. She grabbed a small towel along the way and managed to cover her breasts, but her buttocks were still exposed for the world to see. “Vivien, please,” Patrick started, “I can explain everything. This isn’t what it looks like.” She stepped away from him and made her way over to the storage shed. She had a scary look in her eye that suggested her madness had only begun. Patrick was starting to sit up when Vivien returned gripping a baseball bat. “LIAR!” she shouted, and she swung the bat at Patrick’s ribs. He did everything he could to stop the blow, but the whack deeply punctured his skin. She swung again, but he jumped back, barely managing to evade her second swing. “Stop it! For God’s sake! Put the bat down! Let’s talk about this!” Vivien had tears in her eyes. “We worked on that Jacuzzi all summer! This is what you wanted it for? You are nothing but… a giant turd!” The bat dropped almost instantly, and Vivien rushed into the bushes to throw up. Patrick put one hand on his pained back and another on the top of his head. “You weren’t supposed to be home. You weren’t supposed to see this.” She moved away from the bush. Yellow vomit, with a tinge of orange, dangled like snot from the bottom of her chin. “That was your new secretary, wasn’t it? Goddammit, Patrick, she looks as young as our child!” She pushed him and started pounding on his chest with her fists. “Why would you do this to me!” He just kept looking into her eyes, annoyingly confused. “I don’t know, honey. I guess… I needed something.” Vivien took a breath and became scarily calm. She stared into his eyes with such intensity she looked like she might make his head explode. “What. Did. You. Need.” He sat down in one of the lawn chairs and put his hands over his face. She waited, but he wasn’t responding. “Now you listen to me, darling,” Vivien said, crossing her arms and flipping her hair back. “I’m taking your son. I’m taking your money. I’m taking everything. You just made the biggest fucking mistake of your life, pal.” “Enough!” He stood up and rushed toward Vivien. Before he could put a hand on her, though, she took a step back, made her right hand into a fist, and swung. If this moment had been televised, she would’ve heard the loudest roar of applause in the history of mankind. The fist struck her husband perfectly on his right cheek, stopping his momentum, and causing him to slip and crash against the hard cement ground. Vivien didn’t let him say another word, and she didn’t care to look back. She ran out of the backyard through the open gate and jumped inside her car. She looked forward, only once, to see that her husband wasn’t coming after her. Pulling out of the driveway, she looked down to see the secretary’s towel resting in the middle of the road. It was still damp. She ran it over with delight and drove away with the speed of a crazy person who had just escaped from an insane asylum.

Sandra's Book Club
I just finished reading Slate by Brian Rowe.

It begins with a prologue depicting a mountain hike of a character named Nathan LeMille. The scene was well-written and filled with vivid details.


When I first started reading this, it seemed that the main character would be Nathan, but then chapter one begins with a woman named Vivien Slate, a casting director for movies, starring in the primary role. It made me wonder what happened to Nathan.


Like any typical TV businessman, Vivien is hard-working and extremely busy—so busy, in fact, that she can’t be bothered to remember an intern’s name. She can’t stand people who are ignorant about the entertainment industry; in fact, she nearly clobbers a video store clerk because of her lack of movie knowledge. Vivien also has a son, a child actor she desperately pushes into the spot light of fame and fortune.


We actually don’t run into Nathan again until he accidentally bumps into Vivien on the way to exiting the office of her son’s acting coach.


As the story continues, we are introduced to other characters: Christopher Bells, the storyboard artist with the bowel syndrome and a longing aspiration for the acting life; Lila Perrington, a 50-something “B-level” actress who hates to admit her real age; Garrett Skyler, a former child actor that grew into a hunk that now ignites a fire in Vivien’s fantasies; Tyler Stiletto, a “show me the money” agent; Alyson Baumgartner, the film/acting student who is barely learning the non-California lingo of the industry; and, of course, Nathan LeMille (the guy we meet in the prologue,) another actor trying to get his face out there, even though the scar on his chin was his worst enemy. Every character—all of which come into the story with their own personal baggage—is somehow connected to Vivien, as she, herself, struggles to find balance in her career and family. But then Vivien’s world starts to crash and burn after she catches her husband sticking it to his young secretary in their Jacuzzi, to which, Vivien goes ballistic, grabs a bat, and chases after her cheating husband (a very entertaining scene!)


After that, Vivien can only think of one thing: to get back at her husband for what he did. One way—the only way, as it was bluntly stated—was for her to cheat on him. And that becomes her mission throughout the entire book. I liked how, in the beginning, Vivien was so clumsy about the whole getting-laid thing, especially in regards to the entire process—going to late-night bars, flirting, making eye-contact, going for the first kiss, etc. This gave her character a comedy quality, one straight out of a Sandra Bullock movie.


Eventually, Vivien decides that it would be easier to cast her perfect man; and a fake movie that everyone wants to audition for is born. But suddenly her mission for a one-night stand takes a different turn as Vivien’s true desire is to go to bed with one man for the rest of her life.


Full of humor and sensitivity, this story takes us on a fun roller coaster ride through Hollywood. It was interesting to learn the back story of the movie industry—the casting, the script readings, the editing, the behind-the-scenes look into the real office life. The author clearly knew a lot about movies and had a sense of humor about it. But I did feel that there were a few too many characters, so many that it took some of the focus away from Vivien. Was it really necessary to map out everybody’s life story in so much detail? However, despite the fact that there were too many people, the writer does take us back to the story, clean and simple, without losing the reader’s interest. I must also add that the book had a bit too much sex for my taste. Not that there’s anything wrong with a little sex in a story, but, in retrospect, I do tend to get a little put off—not to mention disgusted—when it gets too racy. I basically had to skip those scenes.


In any sense, curiosity compels you to keep on reading as you wonder how it will all end. Will Vivien achieve what she set out to do? Will she feel any differently about it? How will it affect her and those around her? Will she be happy with herself when this is all over? You can’t help but feel sympathy for Vivien as she goes through a crumbling marriage; however, she also portrays a selfish side I didn’t quite care for when she uses her power as casting director to seduce potential actors. Maybe she deserved to be a little selfish, but not at the advantage of a poor, struggling actor—that’s not professional. Did she really think she could find true love this way?


Towards the end, Vivien becomes more naive, clueless, and temperamental, which all rendered her as a true-to-life character. I mean, I’ll bet there are a lot of people like her in Hollywood Land. Overall, this was a quick and easy read, even as an E-book (I personally prefer reading my stories from an actual book in my hand as opposed to a computer screen.) Still, I could not wait to see how it would end.

Elle Lit
I loved this peek into the world of movie casting! In my younger (naive) days, I wanted to be a casting director myself. Brian Rowe ties his novel into the world of contemporary Hollywood, mentioning blockbuster films and name-dropping actors and directors alike. I especially enjoyed the parallel to The Women, a film used as a means to an end called The Men. The ins and outs of the casting world are believably and humorously portrayed.

Vivien is the ultimate alpha-bitch, but somehow Rowe manages to make her likeable as well. As a reader, I never knew quite what she would do when faced with her many challenges: would her anger explode or would she break down in tears? Often, her reactions included a little bit of both, with some humor thrown in, making her a sympathetic character even during her times of absolute rage. Rowe's other characters were always exciting to get to know; most characters were dynamic, each with their own emotions and motives.

I do have a few (though minor) complaints about the novel. Let me first say that none of these comments are reason not to read this exciting novel. At times, it was unnecessarily vulgar. While some of these scenes did serve an important part in the novel, oftentimes the vulgarity and sexual references in the text did not advance the story. Now, I'm no prude when it comes to these matters (the cursing didn't bother me at all), but I feel the sexual references should at least serve a purpose. I felt myself look away from the text in embarrassment more than once and wish the frequent references to self-pleasure were not there. I felt like a dirty voyeur reading about the character's private thoughts of arousal.

A few scenes were a bit unbelievable, particularly when Vivien has hiked up a mountain and is threatened by a rattlesnake. This scene also did not advance the plot in any way; it seems like it could have been cut. There were also a few typos in the text. Again, nothing major, but enough to notice and make me wish the editing had been done a bit more carefully.

All in all, this a great, fun read. The ending provides an interesting and somewhat terrifying twist, taking this novel a notch or two above fluffy chick-lit. I do wish the ending wouldn't have been quite so rushed only because I was enjoying reading the events unfold; I couldn't stop reading in the last 1/3 of the book because it was so intensely interesting!

I would like to thank author Brian Rowe for providing me with a copy of this book. It was a fantastically fun read! Can I just say the cover is fabulous as well?

Carabosses Library
I was surprised by this book.
It was a really fun read, quick, punchy, with the aura of Hollywood enmeshed in its pages. The main character, Vivien Slate is a powerhouse of laughs as she does whatever she can to get her way in every situation. Some scenes, like a classic purse fight with her husband, had me laughing out loud. She is surprisingly lovable, even in her maniacal selfishness.

I found myself captivated with the ins and outs of movie casting, learning a lot about how a movie comes together and making me very glad I never considered entering that world in any manner.

The second half of the book drags just a bit, there's too much of Brandon, who is not the strongest character, but it picks up as we begin to see the repercussions of Slate's careless behavior. The final few chapters read almost like a crime novel, exciting, suspenseful and not a little frightening.

One issue I did have with the novel, and this is very personal, so take it or leave it, is one particular scene with Slate and a rattlesnake. Now, this is serious nit-picking and this might not bother any other reader, but I need to put it out there. In this scene Slate is confronted with a rattlesnake who blocks her path until she has to kill it. Ok, I am a snake's rights advocate and I take slight issue with this description. Snakes do not chase after people, they do not attack, they flee from humans, so Slate would never have been put in the position where she had to "slay" it. Snake are extremely shy creatures that have been maligned enough, we don't need more fodder.

That's it, rant over. Really, if you're looking for a good, fast read, one that is perfect for the beach or on vacation, this is an excellent choice.