[Maia Wojciechowska] again illustrates, through "The Hollywood Kid," her sensitive insight into the enigma of a genuinely troubled juvenile born to the purple of picture royalty….

Miss Wojciechowska's taut, precise prose makes it plain that she knows the heart and mind of an unusual lad struggling to free himself from a tinseled world he never made or wanted.

The author's expertise extends to the man-made planet bounded by Hollywood Studio sets with their frustrations and tensions, the exclusive menages of Bel Air, the manufactured merriment of Disneyland. She writes as though she had had first-hand contact with Bryan as he lives through the turbulent death of the stepfather-director he admired; the brief contacts with the poet-teacher father he scarcely knows; and the neuroses of the glamorous mother, whose compulsive need for his presence threatens his dream of freedom in an Eastern prep school.

A. H. Weiler, in a...