Jacqueline Susann hated the film; after its November premiere aboard the passenger liner, "Princess Italia", she confronted the film's director, Mark Robson, and stated, "This picture is a piece of shit." In 2001, author Rae Lawrence published a continuation of "Valley of the Dolls", titled "Jacqueline Susann's Shadow of the Dolls" (Crown), which was reputedly based on notes left by Susann for an intended sequel. In its review, "Publishers Weekly" stated, "This tedious, tame sequel is aptly titled, as it languishes deep in the shadow of the original... Susann's original still packs a wallop; the sequel is a pulled punch." Susann's second
Susann Cokal novel, "The Kingdom of Little Wounds", was published in fall 2013 by Candlewick Press and (in the UK and Australia) Walker Books. In the novel, women's bodies are the battlefields for court intrigue involving marriage and medicine during the Renaissance. The novel received glowing endorsements and reviews. Gregory Maguire, author of "Wicked" and other novels, wrote for the book's cover, “Brazen, baroque, "The Kingdom of Little Wounds" plots coordinates of history, fever, and magic in such a way that each is occasionally disguised as the other. However, there's no disguising Susann Cokal's immediate rise to eminence as a pantocrator of