 One of my favorite things in the world are books written by celebrities, and that's not because they're good, in fact the exact opposite is usually true, but because they're just so enjoyably bad. I mean, one of the first big videos I had on my channel was when I reviewed Hillary Duff's terrible young adult series Elixir. Then not long after that I looked at True Allegiance by Ben Shapiro, which was both a bad book and a bad propaganda piece. But then there's plenty of others that I haven't even touched yet. Like City of Indra was written by Kylie Jenner and Kendall Jenner. I'll get to that one one day, don't worry. The Way of the Shadow Wolves was written by Steven Seagull, and just they're so bad based on everything I've heard, and I really want to get to them at some point. But what's even more interesting to me are the people who are not celebrities, but they're near celebrities, or they're near people with money, and that gives them some sort of pseudo-celebrity status. And sometimes they write books too. Enter Michael Bloomberg. Now a few months ago he was known as that dude who tried to run for president, spent $560 million on it and lost in every state, which whatever your political beliefs I think we should be able to agree that that's really funny. He also has a daughter. Her name is Georgina Bloomberg, and she is just an equestrian show horse person. I'm not sure what you would actually call that, but like she did horse shows and stuff. She raised horses, yada yada, that sort of thing. And at one point she was also an author. Enter the A-Circuit by Georgina Bloomberg and Catherine Hopka. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Now the cover alone of this book is just weird. Like it's not immediately awful, but it is odd, and the summary tells you most everything you're gonna need to know. Travelling the country and competing at the top level of horse shows is nothing new for Tommy and Kate. Tommy is a billionaire heiress, owns multiple horses, and takes her riding seriously. Kate puts the working in working student, but every stall she cleans is worth it to train with the best. So when Zara, the wild child of a famous rock star, descends on Pelham Lane stables, her antics, and trailing paparazzi are not welcome. But distraction has many names, and one of them is Fitz. He's the barn's resident Casanova, and he just wants Kate to give him a chance. Then there's the lure of partying in New York City every night, but the real challenge comes when the drama on the ground spills into the show ring, in this hot new series from an equestrian insider. So you read that and you think, okay, this is just someone writing about her hobby and her dad's money got it published. That's kind of dumb and stupid, and I wouldn't enjoy reading it, but it's a little bit of a sweet present from her dad, which I might think that if Georgina was 16 when she wrote this, she was fucking 29. And let's be honest, Catherine Hopka was the ghost writer for all of it. Anyways, that's enough chit chat. Let's get started. One, stalker alert, Zara muttered and discussed that she saw a fat, sweaty guy with a camera zero in on her father. If she thought the paparazzi would be any less annoying here than in LA, she'd thought wrong. Same manure, different coast. There are many ways that you can open up a book, many lines, many actions that you can start on. This is one of them. So Zara is the child of celebrities. Her dad is a rock star named Zack Trask, and her mom is some sort of actress that everyone knows about. And she used to live in Los Angeles, but then she moved over to the east coast. And so she swapped over to Pelham Lane Stables, which is in New Jersey. And this opening scene is just her getting acquainted with everything and complaining about stuff. And this also happens. Or was it? She perked up as she spotted a guy wandering past. He had a big nose and a smattering of zits on his chin, but was otherwise passable looking, clean and preppy in full Abercrombie regalia, though his demeanor was awkward and his expression vaguely uncomfortable. Probably because he knew he was the only straight guy in a half-mile radius, Zara figured. She sidled away from her father's entourage, undoing the last button on her Ralph Lauren skinny fit polo to reveal a little more of her two best features. The ones her mother openly envied, often wondering aloud how her daughter had come by naturally, what she'd had to pay a pricey plastic surgeon for upon first arriving in Hollywood. So on page two of this book, we have a character's mom complaining that her daughter has nicer tits than she does. We're in for an adventure. So the rest of this just goes through the motions of introducing the three main leads. Like, there's Zara, who I talked about. There's Tommy Aronson, who her real name is Thomasina, I think, which is a weird name that I've never heard before, but whatever, that's neither here nor there. And her dad is some sort of billionaire who owns half of New York and has lunch with the mayor all the time and can buy her the nicest horses, the nicest clothes and all that. And she just wants to prove herself. She wants to show that, you know what? It's not just that I can buy all this fancy stuff with my dad's money. It's that I really do have the talent and the skill. I want to make fun of Georgina for putting a self-insert there, but it's kind of hard to do it when she's so open about it. And if you think I'm harsh for constantly bringing up the fact that Georgina Bloomberg is daughter of billionaire Michael Bloomberg and has had everything handed to her in her life, she literally, in her author bio, it's the first sentence. Georgina Bloomberg is the younger daughter of New York City Michael Bloomberg. So, like, come on. It's her own fault. And then the last character is Kate, who is, um... Well, there's really nothing to say about her at this point. She's just a normal middle-class girl who has to work a lot in order to afford riding horses, but she loves it. And granted, I don't know exactly how much this sort of thing would cost. I'm not sure that someone in her position would be able to afford it, but whatever, we'll accept that for what it is. Now, this entire book doesn't really have all that much plot until, like, the last 30 pages. It's mostly just Zara getting sort of acquainted with the new place, people meeting each other, meeting cute boys who all kind of blend together, if I'm being honest, and then making kissy faces. But there are some fun lines now and again, so let's just read some of those. Margie O'Donnell was one of Jamie's clients. She was also the youngest partner in one of the biggest law forms in New York. She had a mouth like a sailor and the self-confidence of a pit bull. Nobody messed with her, not even Summer. Still, she knew better than to take his flirting seriously. Fitz Martin Hall, better known as Fitz, was the only male junior rider at Jamie's barn these days, which made him a hot commodity among the female juniors. It helps that he was tall and charmingly sardonic and that his family had more money than God. Fitz could have had just about any girl he wanted and based on barn gossip, he did, frequently. Kate knew a guy like that was way more than she could handle. She'd barely ever even had a boyfriend. She'd always been too busy with horses to have much time left over for guys. Jesus Christ, work on your phrasing, dude. Not that she was shy, far from it. She'd once gone skinny-dipping in the surf right next to Santa Monica Pier in broad daylight. That sounds like a good way to get labeled a sex offender, but, you know, before anyone could respond to that, she heard a shriek of excitement. This time, at least it wasn't paparazzi, just some embarrassed-looking pony rider's pudgy middle-aged mom who'd probably made out with her first boyfriend to Zach's music back in Jurassic times. Zach was all charm as the woman searched for oversized mom purse for a pen so he could autograph her prize list. Zara rolled her eyes. And so on and so forth. Like I said, there's really not much of a plot. Like, the only thing that kind of resembles a plot comes like a little more than halfway through when Tommy mentions to her dad that rather than going a traditional route of going to some super nice school and then joining up with his company or starting her own, she actually wants to start buying and selling horses and making a living that way. Which, okay, I can respect that. She has actual drive and has a goal that she wants to work towards. But the thing is that it mentions her dad when he agrees to it, mentions, okay, I'll pay for half of the first horse and then I'll take the other half from your trust fund, which that's just him paying for it twice, isn't it? And I really do just wanna stress this a little more that without that kind of seed capital, which is way, way more than a normal person would be able to afford, she would never be able to get started in this. So even if you're able to run that business well, a normal person wouldn't be able to do that. You're not better than anyone else or more hardworking than anyone else. And then in the last 30 pages, there's a little bit more of a plot. So basically, Zara meets up with some other friends from outside of the Pelham Lane stables, but they're still horse riders. And then she kinda, well, she breaks in in the middle of the night and then they start drunkenly riding the horses and jumping them over stuff, which if you're at all familiar with horseback riding, it's dangerous at the best of times, but if you're gonna pull that kinda crap, yeah, that could kill ya. And at one point, Zara does get thrown from a horse and she's luckily uninjured, but the horse is limping afterwards and they think, oh shit, he somehow did something to his leg. They just put him in his stable and they try to break one of the walls so it looks like he was moving around and injured himself. At this point, I really stopped liking Zara. Like, okay, she was kind of a jerk before this, don't get me wrong. And most of the other characters have like literally no personality, so even someone being a jerk is usually better. But she broke into this place that has, where people have been nothing but nice to her really. And then she did something very dangerous and she wound up seriously injuring the horse. Like, at this point they think he might be crippled for life and okay, even if you set aside the fact that you just hurt a living creature, which like horses are, I've been around them a little bit. They're lovely animals, you can pet them and stuff. I've never ridden one, but whatever. Even if you set aside the fact that you just hurt a living creature and betrayed the trust of your friends and everything, that's an expensive mistake. Like, I have no idea what a show horse would cost. Upwards of $100,000, yeah. So even if you just set aside the fact that you hurt a living creature like that, you cost people a lot of money. And for a hot minute, it looks like, hey, maybe Zara's just gonna take responsibility for it and she'll probably get thrown out of the barn, but you know what, she owned up to her mistake and she's gonna try and do her best to fix it. But right before she can do that, Fitz, you know, the dude that had that whole paragraph about how he fucked everyone in the stables, he stands up and says, it was me. I didn't put the horse away properly and that's how he hurt himself. So, and he did that to impress Kate for reasons I still don't totally understand. She has, she doesn't have a personality, but you know, he did that to impress her and then at the end, she's like, you know what, I kinda like you, I guess we can date now. And then it just kinda stops with everyone being, I don't know, maybe not exactly happy, but they're like, well, we're alive and we're gonna keep moving on for another day. And, well, that was it. That's the A-Circuit by Georgina Bloomberg. And, you know, there are some pretty funny lines in there, there are some pretty cringy moments in there and that entertained me a lot, but honestly, overall, I would just say it's boring because 70% of it, or how more than 70% of it, was just people going out to parties, going on dates, texting friends, looking at boys, you know, that sort of thing. And I just, there's nothing valuable in here. There's nothing interesting at all. And, excuse me. And so, while it did entertain me, I wouldn't really recommend other people go out and find it and just read it out loud or anything because it's not like, I don't know, 50 Shades or hell, even True Allegiance where you can just read the prose and it's hilariously bad. Like, in this, it's only a few points are hilariously bad. Here's the thing though. The A-Circuit is actually part of a series. There are three other books. And, unfortunately, none of them are available on Amazon right now. Some idiot bought the last copies. And if you're wondering, what idiot would buy the last copies of Michael Bloomberg's Daughter's Horse books? This idiot. This idiot right here bought the last copies of Michael Bloomberg's Daughter's Horse books. So, we go into book two, which is my favorite mistake. And the one on the cover of this, I'm actually not sure which one of the main characters she's supposed to be. Because the first one, we have that dark-haired girl with the horse. The second one, we have a blonde girl with a horse. And the third one, we have a black girl with a horse. And then the fourth one, we have the blonde girl and some dude kissing and they have two horses. None of the main characters get any sort of real description of what they look like for the most part. And so, I genuinely have no idea which of these is which. Like, I don't know which one of them is supposed to be black, but I don't think it's Tommy. That's all I can say. So, how does my favorite mistake start off? Well, it starts with Tommy being at a party and meeting some dude. Nice view, huh? Someone said from behind her. She glanced back. The guy standing there was named Alex Nakano and Tommy had only met him an hour ago, but she was already intrigued. For one thing, he was hot with a capital wow. He told her that his father was a Japanese-American hedge fund manager and his mother a Brazilian-born art dealer with an exclusive little gallery space down in Soho. Alex's multi-culti heritage had combined to give him a totally unique look, spiky dark hair, toffee colored eyes, a lean compact body, plus a mischievous little smirk that seemed to be all his own. It had been a long time since Tommy had felt such an immediate spark with anyone and she was enjoying the feeling. The phrase multi-culti heritage go into museum as just the single dumbest collection of words I have ever heard in my goddamn life. So this one continues to have basically no plot whatsoever. Like, the biggest one is that Tommy and the cute dude Alex, he keeps convincing her to ditch her horse training to go out and party and stuff and that's the main thing. There's some issues with Kate too because her mom has OCD and then we get to this scene. Kate's fist clenched around her fork. She was too tired and stressed to deal with this right now. She wanted to rebel against her mother's cheery facade, let her know she knew what was going on even if the only way she could think to do it was to shove piles of food into each other to see how her mother would react. She actually lifted the fork to do it but her hand froze in midair. The fork poised half an inch above the carrots. She couldn't follow through on the plan. It felt physically impossible. So basically Kate developed OCD immediately like between lunch and dinner I guess and now she has to start counting things and doing it in sets of four just like her mom and I can appreciate what they're trying to do here like they're trying to show a character struggle with some severe mental problems and I can, I don't know if I can applaud that but you know they're trying something. The thing is OCD does not pop up that quickly and it later goes away just as quickly. Like they kind of just forgot about that plot point so you know, yeah I don't want to compliment that. Meanwhile due to Zara's shenanigans her dad has gone on tour over in Europe and they've hired her cousin Sophie or maybe not hired but they've brought her cousin Sophie over to keep an eye on her and then this happens. The elevator slit open, spitting Zara out onto the landing while her head was really pounding or was that her head? She blinked realizing there was music coming from behind the loft door. Loud music, huh? She muttered fumbling for her key. When she let herself in the first thing she saw was a buff guy in his early 20s dancing in the middle of the room with his shirt off and his pants too actually. All he had on was a pair of silk boxers. Then she looked around and saw three other guys she'd never seen before. One was sucking down a beer and playing Grand Theft Auto on the plasma TV. Another was digging through Zach's liquor cabinet. The third was on the couch with his tongue stuck down Zara's cousin's throat. So basically Sophie is a crazy party girl who is constantly causing trouble and well, there's just a couple of things I want to say about that. One, that's not how people actually party, even crazy party people, that's not how they do it. That's how sheltered kids think that people party. Like Jesus. Another thing is, if it was just Zara and four dudes and no other girls, what were they doing all night? In fact, I don't have a whole lot of tabs in these because just pointing out all the stuff I hated it got redundant after a while and eventually it just started pointing out stuff that I thought was funny. But, I mean, Jeepers, Creepers, they go over the party making a mess and beer cans being all over the floor and smelling like cigarettes like 80 fucking times. Jesus Christ. After a couple of times of doing this, Zara gets a call from her mom. Okay, now what? Zara was heading for the stairs when she heard her phone ringing in her room. She dashed in and grabbed it off her bedside table. To her supplies, they call her ID red Gina Gerard. Now, that line just fucking sent me for several reasons. One, Zara, Gina Gerard, is your mom a porn star? And number two, her contact, her mom's contact info on her phone is just her mom's full name. Am I the only one that has my mom's contact info just under the name mom? Or do other people do that? Do other people have their mom's full name on their... Okay. Zara hesitated, her gaze straying through the open doorway to the overlook. Living in a nonstop party zone was getting a little old. And there was a really easy way to put a stop to it. All she had to do was tell her mother the truth about everything that had been going on. And Stacey would be on a bus back to Southeast Bumbleflick as fast as she could pick up her malslut wardrobe. I think I was calling her Sophie before this. It's Stacey. So, you know, some more nonsense happens. There's like not much plot. At one point, Kate tears her riding breeches and tries to repair them, but she's unable to. And Zara buys her a pair of like fancy new riding gloves, which she's grateful for. But since she doesn't have any breeches and she just can't bring herself to ask her friends to borrow theirs, she tries to sell the gloves that Zara bought her. And Zara finds out about it and is upset with her, like rightfully so, I think. And then they just tell her off, like, come on, we're your friends, just ask us for help. And then all is good again. And yeah, that's about it for this book. Book three, of course, aka the one with the black girl on the cover. So this one is easily the most boring out of all of them, in my opinion. Not that I'm expecting a whole lot from fucking Georgina Bloomberg and Catherine Hopka. Hey, fun fact, Catherine Hopka used to write bionicle books. That's true, by the way. I think the most interesting bit about this whole book is how Zara's mom comes to stay with her for a while and Stacy has left, you know, even though she was supposed to be looking after Zara, she just left for like a week or something. And then Zara has to pretend that she's still there while her mom is there, her mom, Gina Gerard. Seriously, that name just fucking, that name sends me every time. And also, Tommy goes to, I don't know, a college to look and see like, oh, do I wanna go to this school? And I think my favorite part about all these books is just the descriptions of certain characters. Gotcha, Aronson, Abby waved from the driver's seat. She was Tommy's age and height, but probably outweighed her by 30 pounds, though not because she was fat. Abby's friends sometimes called her Earth Mama because she was built like one of those pagan fertility goddesses, all boobs, hips and thighs. Ladies, would you want your friends calling you Earth Mama and comparing you to ancient fertility goddesses because you have giant thighs and boobs? I really think I'm just gonna be reading some of the funnier passages from now on. Zara was a little surprised. Didn't the guy know who she was? Didn't he know who Gina was? He had to be either blind or faking. And when she saw those dark brown eyes slipped downward again, she was pretty sure he wasn't blind. Zara would have guessed he was at least 21, if not a year or two older. How old are you? She asked. A smile played over his lips. Isn't that kind of a personal question? Like a lady never reveals her age or whatever? He laughed. If you must know, I'm 20. What about you? Or are you going to turn that lady thing back on me now? Don't worry, I'm no lady, Zara smirked. 16, almost 17. Jailbait, nice, he grinned. Okay, anyone that would actually use the word jailbait has not left their mother's basement in probably six months and would certainly not be going out to bars trying to pick up underage girls. Zara scanned the Facebook photo album she'd just opened on her laptop, clicking on a sexy shot of herself in a bikini. She attached it to the email she'd just typed up, urging Marcus to say he'd come to Summer's party. It was Wednesday already and he hadn't given her an answer yet. And after that delicious first kiss the other day, she didn't want to leave anything to chance. Hitting send, she waited for the email to whoosh off into cyberspace, then smiled. There, that should help convince him. Not long after this, we find out that there's a blog being written which is spreading rumors about the goings-on at Pelham Lane and it's nothing really all that salacious. It's like someone's pregnant and it's not like a teenager, it's a grown woman who's in her fucking 30s or something and other ones is like, oh, these people are gonna start dating and it'd certainly be really annoying to have that sort of thing spread about you but it's really nothing that bad. And at some point in all this, Kate and Fitz broke up but he comes back to her window and starts singing in front of dozens of people and she takes him back because he's just too pathetic, I guess. And that's the end of Off Course. I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a pun for Of Course or if it's just saying that things are Off Course but there's really no course at all with these books. And then we reach the finale or I would say climax but this is not nearly exciting enough to be a climax. It's reined in with the one with the girl and the boy and the two horses, you know, the sea, the thing. And even throughout this whole thing I only have like eight or 10 tabs because there's just nothing even funny anymore about all this. They're breaking up, they're getting back together and there's not even that many funny lines anymore. Here's one. Taryn stood and came to meet her with a hug. She was tall and slim with close crops, dark hair and the kind of face that always looked happy even when she wasn't smiling. Is that supposed to be like the opposite of resting bitch face? Because I mean, I have a resting bitch face but like resting happy face, is that a thing? I've never heard of it. Zara waited until her mother turned away then rolled her eyes. Since when had Gina Gerard famous for playing all sorts of characters from carefree party girls to gorgeous but dedicated career women? Decided to audition for the one role no one would ever believe they're her and super responsible soccer mom. Okay. I already told you that sounds like a porn star's name. You don't need to add fuel to that fire. So they all have some trouble. Kate starts failing a class but then lies to her parents and they don't find out about it. And you know, lots of lovely stuff. They go to competitions which I genuinely don't understand anything about what goes on in those things because this book doesn't really bother to explain it. And that's the thing is that these might have been interesting to people like me who don't know anything about show horsing, show equestrianism, whatever you wanna call it. If you just bother to like explain it a little and treat it like the sport that it is because it is a sport. It does take a lot of training and talent and whatever else to be good at it. But nonetheless, the fact that nothing has ever explained means that I'm just totally lost and when I'm totally lost it's impossible to care about what's going on. So had this just taken a little bit of time to explain how horse showing works and how you can be better at it. What sort of training they go through and just all the little minutia as well. Like, you know, you start off with the basics and then get to the minutia. Then it could have been something really, well, maybe not really special but it could have been something worth reading at least. Like a lot of sports anime that I've seen have done that before where they take a sport that either I don't know much about or just don't care about and then they get really into all the basics and show all these characters. Yeah, they really care about this and it's something they're passionate about and we're seeing how hard they train in what ways they train and then we see them play some games and it gets into like the minutia of how it works and just, you know, that sort of thing. And it can make you care about something that you didn't care about before. These just completely fail to do that and it's not like they didn't have time to do it. I mean, they're all pretty short. This last one is only 230 pages or 240. Yeah, 231 pages. Like you could have added some stuff here. Anyways, they find out who was running the blog. It was a girl named Danny who was in book two or three fell off a horse and broke her leg and, you know, she was all right but she was laid up for a couple of weeks and then while she was doing it, she just wrote the blog and all her friends when they find out are a little upset with her but then she apologizes and everything is good because there are no stakes here and that is the end of the Michael Bloomberg's daughter's horse book saga and honestly, it was more dull than anything because with most celebrity books, they're extremely up their own asses. Don't get me wrong and there's hints of Georgina being up there but there's also a few hints of self-awareness so I can't make that much fun of her for it and because she hired a ghost writer the prose isn't really that bad or anything and the story isn't unbridled insanity the way. Well, I don't know if I'd call Elixir unbridled insanity but it's something and everything I've heard about Steven Seagal's Way of the Shadow Wolves is also unbridled insanity but that guy's life is also unbridled insanity. Did you know he's the legal guardian to a member of the Tibetan royal family? That's true, by the way, look it up but this, it's just like for the most part, very normal problems and it's not that that can't be exciting, they can be but they're just treated with such, I don't know, kid gloves like Kate's OCD for example, it feels like more of a trait that a cartoon character would have which then goes away and so we don't really get anything out of that. We don't spend nearly enough time with Tommy really training her horses and trying to make them better so that she can sell them for a profit. We don't spend enough time with that for to really feel her passion for it and at the beginning I kind of wanted to give this series credit for that. I was like, wow, that's at least one thing I can respect her for but by the end I had mostly forgotten about it and Zara is just genuinely kind of a terrible person. Like she, like I said, injured the horse at the beginning but then later on she's lying to her parents, lying to her friends, breaking up with her boyfriends without giving them a chance to explain themselves because she accuses them of doing bad things. It's really a little unpleasant but even without that or even including that there's really nothing in here that's super upsetting and there's nothing offensive so like I can't even rail on it for that. The most I can say is that there are a couple of moments where the pro slips and it gets really funny but it's just not worth having to go through all the other crap to get there. So if you want to read Michael Bloomberg's daughter's horse novels, the A-Circuit by the way, I haven't been using the title very much but that's what they're called. I don't know if I can recommend them to you even if you're a fan of awful books like I am but if you really, really are curious then just read the first one and leave it at that because it's not like it takes all that much time. Thank you to everyone who watched this far in my ranting about obscure weird topics and thanks especially to all my patrons whose names are here and my $10 and up guys are Oppo Savilainen, Andrew Dixon, Ashley Watson, Ava Tumor, Brother Santotys, Christopher Quinton, Emily Miller, Joel, Johnny St. Clair, Madison Lewis Bennett, Taylor Briggs, Tobacco Crow, Toefer Wheeler, and Vaivictus as well as all the other names here. You guys are awesome. If you want to get your name up here or access to other goodies then go to my Patreon page, check that out. And if you can't do that then just sharing this video and commenting on it and all that, that helps me too. Anyways, see you next time. Bye.