Summer: The perfect time for ‘Suburbanistas’

A good “beach read” is a book that is, above all, entertaining. It also contains a friendship, a bad guy, some glamour, some sex, and good that triumphs over evil. “Suburbanistas” has all that — and more.

Stella Powers is an A-list movie star who has just landed the role of a lifetime — not to mention a young, hot rock-star husband — when she must put her glamorous life on hold. A family tragedy brings Stella back to her hometown of Homewood, N.J., and her arrival excites the town and shakes up many lives, including her own.

While Stella has been living in L.A., her childhood best friend, Mary Jean, stayed in Homewood and married her high-school sweetheart, Pete. Mary Jean and Pete have four children and struggle to make ends meet.

Mary Jean had not spoken to Stella since the day she left town when they were 17, but she never stopped thinking about her. It was hard not to, considering Stella’s face was constantly plastered across the covers of lifestyle and tabloid magazines.

Mary Jean thinks of Stella’s return to Homewood as a second chance: a chance to reconnect with the only woman who knows her so completely, as well as the chance to help save the town of Homewood as they know it.

Developers have been buying up pieces of Homewood — historic houses and small-town shops — and converting them onto cookie-cutter minimansions and franchise store chains. As these outsiders move in, they are slowly edging longtime residents out, including Mary Jean and her family. She needs Stella and her superstar influence to help save the town.

From start to finish, “Suburbanistas” is a page-turner of guilty pleasures. But really, there should be no guilt associated with a little literary fun.