Kirkus Reviews, which bills itself the world’s toughest book critic, has issued an advance rave review of Unreal Estate. It says the book is “rich in incident and full of thwarted ambition, visionary zeal and conspicuous consumption [and] salacious gossip about [the] socially ambitious builders who forged such exclusive havens for the rich as Bel Air and Beverly Hills and whose family histories are rife with alcoholism, bitter infighting, sex scandals and suicide. This being L.A., there are also accounts of the housing adventures of movie stars…[and] unlovely status-driven mania…Gross has clearly done his research, and many anecdotes…have a comic snap that enliven the proceedings. In addition, there is schadenfreude to be found in the accounts of overreaching billionaires and scandal-rocked social-register types…. A juicy, breezily told social history of La La Land, deal by deal.”