The United States is without a monarchal figure for citizens to follow, but pop culture has found a suitable replacement — movie stars.

The film industry has long fascinated the American public and Rachel Pine attempts to reveal some the inner machinations of the business in her gossipy first novel, “The Twins of Tribeca.”

Unfortunately, the book fails to reach the heights of other, more well-written novels attempting to entertain and provide some sort of social commentary.

Pine’s story centers on the life of a young publicist, Karen Jacobs, and her time spent working at a film company that is a thinly veiled disguise for the author’s own former employer, Miramax Films.

Jacobs’ job quickly consumes her entire life, and the book does a good job of showing how ridiculous a life in the entertainment industry can be. Many times, however, the protagonist appears just as shallow as the people she works with. Pine does a poor job of making us want to identify with her heroine. The reader doesn’t end up wanting to sympathize with Karen Jacobs, and this causes the novel to lose some of its emotional impact.

Lack of character development hurts the novel more than anything. Jacobs, her antagonists, her supporters — none of them successfully leap off of the page. Pine tries to make them quirky, such as a coworker who steals soap from everyone since the company doesn’t provide it, but the author needs to learn that quirky doesn’t necessarily mean interesting.

The novel ends in a fairly open-ended fashion, but the reader can’t truly be bothered to wonder much about what is going to happen to all the characters.

Another issue the reader must deal with is pacing. The novel starts off slowly, with too much background information on Jacobs’ failed family. Even when background material helps provide depth for a character, if the author doesn’t properly use the information, it becomes unnecessary — this is the case for Pine.

Many elements, if used properly, could have come together to make a much better book. All the ingredients for an entertaining novel are present in “Twins,” but Pine chooses to throw them all together and hope they mesh, as opposed to working with the pieces to create the most flavorful final product.

Many characters and films mentioned in the novel are easily recognized by movie buffs as real-world entertainment figures, despite Pine changing their names. For some, the most pleasurable part of the reading experience may be attempting to use some of the clues Pine drops in order to figure out who the characters are really supposed to be. For anyone who has any knowledge of the film industry, this should not prove very challenging, as the author doesn’t make much of an effort to hide who she is talking about.

“The Twins of Tribeca” is not without its good points, but the poor characterization sinks the book.

Everyone should make an effort to fit in one more beach book this Labor Day weekend before being drowned in a tidal wave of homework, but “The Twins of Tribeca” is likely to leave you high and dry, so take the time to find something with a little higher quality.