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The A-List is a series of young-adult novels by Zoey Dean (a pseudonym for husband and wife team Cherie Bennett and Jeff Gotesfeld) centered on Anna Percy, an East Coast WASP who moves to Los Angeles and tries to reinvent herself amongst the wealthy elite in Beverly Hills: handsome Ben Baumbach, sarcastic Sam Sharpe, beautifully cruel Cammie Sheppard, New Age-obsessed Dee Young, and good guy Adam Flood.Much of the series focuses on Anna’s on-again and off-again relationship with Ben Birnbaum and her Fish Outof Water experiences in Los Angeles, where wealth and status operate very differently from the WASP hierarchy that she’s accustomed to in New York City, while also focusing on the various personal dramas of the group.The books were bestsellers and also spawned a short-lived spin-off series called “The A-List: Hollywood Royalty” that focused on a new cast of characters.
The series is as follows:
- The A-List
- Girls on Film
- Blonde Ambition
- Tall Cool One
- Back in Black
- Some Like it Hot
- American Beauty
- Heart of Glass
- Beautiful Stranger
- California Dreaming
The spin-off series is as follows:
- The A-List: Hollywood Royalty
- Sunset Boulevard
- City of Angels
This series provides examples of:
- The Beautiful Elite: Most of the protagonists and other periphery characters. Subverted in that minor character Parker Pinelli does come from a working class background (although he hides it) and while Adam Flood is certainly upper middle class (both parents are lawyers), he lives much more modestly than the others.
- Beta Bitch: Sam starts off as this for Cammie but drops this when she and Anna become friends.
- Betty and Veronica: Anna and Cammie are this to Ben.
- Buxom Beauty Standard: It is frequently noted that Cammie got 34D breast implants for her sixteenth birthday, which helped her become even more of a sultry vixen.
- Celebrity Resemblance: Anna is often compared to Grace Kelly and Gwyneth Paltrow and at one point, when Anna and Sam attend the Oscars, Anna is mistaken for some in-universe up and coming actress.
- Childhood Friends: Cammie, Sam, Dee, and Ben are all childhood friends.
- Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Dee is this and her New-Age Retro Hippie tendencies are often brushed off until Black in Black where she suffers a mental breakdown.
- Defrosting Ice Queen: Anna purposely tries to invoke this, vowing to be the total opposite of her East Coast self in Los Angeles.
- Driven by Envy: In the first book, Sam, Cammie, and Dee are this in regards to Anna’s arrival and her position as Ben’s new date, especially Cammie. Sam loudly denounces Anna as a B-list slut, Cammie purposefully rips Anna’s dress, and then Dee tries to claim she’s pregnant with Ben’s baby. They get better (except for Cammie).
- Dude Magnet: Cammie. Almost every guy she interacts with is taken by her good looks.
- Dumb Blonde: Dee falls into this.
- Fallen Princess: Cammie in Blonde Ambition: her friends drift away from her and she’s forced to plan her own 18th birthday party alone. Plus, in a humiliating display at her party, her father abruptly cuts off her credit cards and tows her car.
- The Fashionista: All of the characters qualify, as befitting their status as wealthy people who have access to expensive, designer clothes (both vintage and new).
- Friendly Enemy: Anna and Cammie. The two become friendlier when Cammie starts dating Adam and even seem to actually become friends in American Beauty which is quickly undone when Cammie breaks up with Adam and informs Anna that she will be going after Ben even though he and Anna are still together.
- Freudian Excuse: Several characters have one.
- Cammie: Her mother died myseriously when she was young, just before her father made it big as a talent agent and became a workaholic so her cruelty is a front to cover up her insecure attachments.
- Sam: Her father is the biggest action star in the world and never has any time for her so she’s partly interested in filmmaking because she hopes she will become successful enough to finally grab his attention. Also, growing up in Hollywood where thinness is valued has caused her to have a dysmorphic view of her body.
- Anna: Her parents were cold, unfeeling WASPs who thought any emotional outburst was deeply embarrassing, even after her older sister struggled with addiction, so despite her best efforts, she struggles to express her emotions and is often accused of being cold.
- Girl Posse: Anna, Cammie, Dee, and Sam are one despite their varying degrees of dislike of each other.
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Hollywood Homely/ Hollywood Pudgy: Sam’s size is described as fluctuating between size 8-10, which is an average size for an American woman, but because she lives in Los Angeles and is the daughter of a famous movie star, she thinks of herself (and is frequently treated as) ugly and frumpy, especially compared to her thin friends. - Horrible Hollywood: Hollywood is portrayed as a pretty dysfunctional place, especially for the children of the power players. This is specifically portrayed in Girls On Film and Blond Ambition when Anna works as an intern for a talent agency and a teen soap drama.
- I Should Make A Movie About This: In the final book, Anna turns her senior year experiences into a screenplay and she makes a deal to turn it into a movie, with Sam directing. They even agree in universe to title it “The A-List” and the first in the spin-off series takes place at the movie premiere, with mentions of the in-universe lead film characters being thinly-veiled Expys of the main characters.
- Loving a Shadow: Ben accuses Anna of this when she is reluctant to support his plan to drop out of Princeton to open a nightclub, claiming she only loves him when he’s the Ivy League-attending good guy she thinks is appropriate to date
- Karma Houdini: Cammie gets away with a lot of bad behavior and even consequences for her actions fade away pretty quickly. For example, her credit cards are confiscated in Blonde Ambition they seem to be returned in later books.
- Acknowledged in-universe in American Beauty where Sam, Anna, and Cammie are caught trespassing on a beachfront property and because they come from wealthy, well-connected families, their punishment is merely serving community service for a charity fashion show, which is actually fun for them.
- Nice Girl/ Nice Guy: Anna, Dee, and Adam are frequently described as the nicest people in the series and even when they clearly dislike someone, they are rarely rude.
- Rich Bitch: Cammie and Sam are this although Sam Takes A Level In Kindness as she becomes friends with Anna.
- Unlimited Wardrobe: Cammie, Sam, and Dee fall into this. Subverted with Anna who frequently wears her grandmother's vintage Chanel pieces.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Several plot lines are introduced early in the series that never get addressed again.
- Django, Anna’s mysterious chauffeur who lives in the guest house, is implied to have once been a great music prodigy but as Anna gets involved with the Beverly Hills High crew, this gets dropped.
- Mia, Cammie’s step-sister who abruptly moved in with them in American Beauty was hinted to have a dark reason for leaving her previous living arrangement but she is never brought up again in subsequent books.
- For a while, there was a big build up as to the circumstances around the mysterious death of Cammie’s mother but in the end it turns out that Cammie’s mother drowned herself after struggling with depression for a long time and none of the adults in Cammie’s life decided to tell her because they wanted to preserve her happy memories of her mother.
