Katie Fisher has been finding life a bit boring since she lost her presenting job on Hello Britain!. Sure, she's got new boyfriend Adam to keep her days filled, but the TV work is drying up and Katie is worried about losing public interest. When the latest celeb reality show Celebrity X-Treme comes knocking, Katie decides to take it against the advice of all around her. She thinks she'll be fine in with a Page 3 model, a comedian, and an ex-soap actor but she isn't counting on behind-the-scenes skullduggery. Will the big paycheck and recognition be worth the embarassment and ridicule Katie is bound to suffer over in Norway for her trouble? Or is "Celebrity X-Treme" the final nail in Katie's coffin?

As I said, the character of Katie was also the lead in Penny's first book, so if you haven't read that one first, well done. Honestly, you haven't missed that much if you haven't read it and this can read as a standalone book well enough as references are made to events that happened in the first book and fill you in enough to understand what is going on. My main problem with this book was that Katie is the lead once more, because I really hated her character in the first one. She really does remind me so much of Penny that I have to wonder if she based the character on herself - she thinks she is funny when she really isn't, she's sarcastic and just quite annoying to read a whole book about. I began not to care about Katie, which is the opposite of what you should do about the lead character of a book and was quite tempted to skim read the bits about Katie at times because it seemed to drag on and not go anywhere.

It seems that a lot of celebrities are jumping on the writing bandwagon and while some have made a success of it, Penny Smith isn't one of them. Her writing style is very unsmooth and jolty, and I find reading her books quite hard work. I don't deny that there is definite improvement between her debut novel and this one, but the major faults are still there for me - unlikeable characters and uninteresting and slow-progressing storylines. I felt the plot of this book could have been made much more fun, and what actually did happen could have taken half the pages it actually took to take place. If you haven't read Penny's books yet, I wouldn't rush out to get them - if you must, get them from the library then you haven't lost anything. It's really disappointing, but a tad better than the first although that's not saying much.