Book Review

By Carl Hiaasen.
337 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

"Star Island", is about the self-destructive escapades of an over-the-hill former child star,'Cheryl, née Cheryl Gail Bunterman', a famous singer called 'Cherry Pye'. She's a pop singer of the "barely legal slut" school, employed by Jailbait Records. She sells millions of singles with titles like "Runaway Tongue" and "Jealous Bone," and so what if she has a voice like "a sackful of starving kittens"? That's what backup singers and celebrity machinery are for, and, as a result, Cherry Pye is a bona fide star and very much an island: vacuous, egoistic and shrill, and given to pensées like "After I die, see, I really wanted to come back as a whale? But now I don't, 'cause who wants to get, like, stabbed with a harpoon?" The book goes on to explain who Cherry is and how she got that way.