Maia Wojciechowska is an extremely gifted writer. But in [The Hollywood Kid] it is painful to say, the excellence of her writing cannot mask the fact that what she is dishing out is specious, The Hollywood Kid is a stark little tale that begins at the bottom of despair and swiftly descends. Bryan Wilson, the 15-year-old only child of Hollywood's greatest movie queen, sits morosely beside his mother's huge swimming pool and asks: "Does life need to be so crummy?"

Bryan and his one friend, a 12-year-old girl named Martha, are lonely, sophisticated, cynical, bright, world-weary kids, drenched in luxury but thirsty for emotional life, deprived not only of love but also of anything resembling a normal home. They are frightened, hypersensitive, withdrawn and thoroughly bewildered. Both kids are casualties of destroyed marriages and disordered family lives, and both suffer from indifferent, egotistical and usually absent parents. And...