From Booklist
Reviewed with Kristin McCracken's
James Van Der Beek.
Gr. 5-8. Good choices for reluctant readers, these entries in the Celebrity Bios series combine simple sentences, brevity, and plenty of color photos. The books, which focus on the subjects' childhoods and early successes, will draw readers easily through the text with frequent headings, time lines, and boxes with fun gossip. Despite the appeal of the basic language, however, Mariah is much too simplistic in places, giving, for example, one-sentence reasons why Mariah's parents divorced, why she married, and so forth. However, both titles offer plenty of detail for excited fans (Van Der Beek has to shave twice a day to look like a high-school student), and with the focus on the celebrities' roots, these titles won't date too quickly. Gillian Engberg
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