Gorgeous (Paul Rudnick)

SUMMARY: Inner beauty wants out.

When eighteen-year-old Becky Randle’s mother dies, she’s summoned from her Missouri trailer park to meet Tom Kelly, the world’s top designer. He makes her an impossible offer: He’ll create three dresses to transform Becky from a nothing special girl into the most beautiful woman who ever lived.

Becky thinks Tom is a lunatic, or that he’s producing a hidden camera show called World’s Most Gullible Poor People. But she accepts, and she’s remade as Rebecca. When Becky looks in the mirror, she sees herself – an awkward mess of split ends and cankles. But when anyone else looks at Becky, they see pure five-alarm hotness. Soon Rebecca is on the cover of Vogue, the new Hollywood darling, and dating celebrities. Then Becky meets Prince Gregory, heir to the British throne, and everything starts to crumble. Because Rebecca aside, Becky loves him. But to love her back, Gregory would have to look past the blinding Rebecca to see the real girl inside. And Becky knows there’s not enough magic in the world.

MY THOUGHTS:

This book was fairly interesting. It kind of read like a parody because even though at the heart of the book there's a good message, there's all this humor and wit. I will admit this isn't the BEST book I've read this summer but it's definitely one I'd like to re-read in person (aka not a e-book but a plastic covered hardcover from a library).

However, in the beginning I found it hard for me to get into it. I actually started this book weeks ago but the first couple of chapters bored me and were taking to long to get to the plot that I forgot all about it until last night. Not to mention the descriptions of the outfits people were wearing and other things were sooooo long. I started skipping those paragraphs so get the point of the scene. Not a good thing I know but still. Over-all I did mostly enjoy this book there were some plot holes.

It's revealed that the Tom Kelly that Becky meets isn't exactly real. Or alive I mean. It turns out that he's her dad and he died before she was born from AIDS (I could be wrong about the disease but it was never stated by name). He really did love her mom and she made him promise to give her daughter beauty too. So I'm guessing that the reason no one saw him for the 20-ish years before Becky came to NYC is that he was dead. In the beginning I thought maybe he was the devil, and I wasn't the only one but the whole death thing and how he came back to life thing wasn't really touched on. So I don't get what happened. Just that after Becky got her happily ever after, he called her and said goodbye, her dead mom said she loved her and the call was over. I was/am so confused.

Also I wasn't that invested in Greg and Becky's love story. I thought it was somewhat interesting the way they're conversations went and I think even if they loved each other, I don't think they were IN LOVE. But maybe that would happen in time. And at least it wasn't that "insta-Love" crap. I kind of wanted Becky-as-Rebecca to ask Greg if he could still love her if she didn't look the way she did. I mean, sure the end of the book answers this question but I'm curious to hear Greg's reaction to that especially considering his WTF reaction when she pulled off her veil at their wedding and was just Becky after that. Lol, although I don't know how she and Rocher managed to run away without the Brit police catching up to them.

I really did enjoy Becky's best friend although she kind of annoyed me when she got into a fight with Lady Jessalyn (the one England actually wants Prince Greg to marry) and only Becky is implicated in the press for it. It was ridiculous. And I could not believe that neither one of them thought to save any of the Rebecca money she had to have made from her VOGUE shoot or the movie she did. But it did seem very dramatic that they became poor after that. It kind of reminded me of the end of [book: Jane Eyre] after Jane runs from Rochester and goes and lives with these other people.

Anyway, over all this book is a interesting read. Although I think the writing and plot holes do give the reading a bit of a hard time (and I NEVER notice plot holes) I definitely think this book offers something to readers that other books similar to this don't...lol although I can't exactly describe what that is.

MY DE-CRYPTION OF THE BOOKS CHARACTERS AND THEIR REAL LIFE COUNTERPARTS

Tom Kelly=Ralph Lauren

Prince Gregory=Prince William

Prince Jasper=Prince Harry

Princess Alicia=Princess Diana

Queen Catherine=Queen Elizabeth II

Lady Jessalyn=Kate Middleton

Shop-a-Lot=Save-a-Lot/Shop-n-Save (I figured this out from my time in Missouri for college)

Valu-Brite=Wal-Mart

The Sweetest Spell

I had a feeling when I first read the summary for this novel a couple of weeks ago that it wouldn't exactly have a believable factor. I mean, a girl who can churn cream into chocolate? That's as unbelievable as it gets. But I thought that the story would be interesting and maybe some sort of spin on the Rumpelstiltskin story. However, apparently this story is supposed to be a retelling of The Ugly Duckling fairy tale. I didn't really see that though. It was kind of shown in a way but not exactly to the extent of the fairy tale.

the synopsis of the book...
Emmeline is a member of division of a mythical kingdom that has been cast out by the rest of it's members due to history and prejudice (they are marked by their red hair and called "dirt-scratchers"), then she in turn has been cast out of her society for not dying when her dad left her in the woods to die because she has a physical disability. However, some cows surround her and he decides to take her back. Everything changes the day that the royal soldiers come to her village and take all the unmarried men away for a way during the annual husband market (a dirt-scratcher tradition that auctions off eligible men in the community for the women to bid on). After the men are forced into service, the village floods and Emmeline's favorite cow dies, but not before bestowing a gift upon her.

Emmeline washes up in Normal-Citizens Land by a dairy boy who finds one of his cows guarding over her as she lays passed out on the shore. He and his family takes her in and she is revealed to be beautiful and the dairy boy, Owen, who of course is a lady's man, finds himself enthralled by her. While showing her around, Emmeline accidently brews a bucket of chocolate that Owen's family tells everyone in town about.
Before Owen and Emmeline ever have any real substantial conversation that can function as the basis of a relationship, Emmeline is kidnapped by someone wanting to exploit his gift for his own selfish reasons. Owen gets stabbed, Emmeline believes he's dead and gets carried off and eventually ends up serving the king and queen. Owen goes after her despite his doctor's orders but ends up getting thrown in jail and sentenced to mining, Les Mis style. It turns out that everyone stolen from Emmeline's village including her dad, was forced into slavery to mine gold for the king and queen who have been imposing ridiculous taxes (there's even a tax on water) on their kingdom and that's where Owen ends up.

In the beginning of the novel, Owen read Emmeline the story behind why her and her people were exiled in the first place and I was sure from the moment I heard it, that the history was fake. And as it turned out, I was right. The current queen and her son (who is a homosexual) are Flatlanders/dirt-scratchers who dye their hair. If anything the real history seemed like a combination of the European history between Native Americans and African Americans. But with chocolate.

In the end, Emmeline discovers Owen's alive and they declare their love for each other, she and the prince run his parents out of the kingdom and she teaches other women from her village how to make chocolate and the story ends happily ever after.

how i felt about it...
The love story in this book really bothered me. First off, Emmeline and Owen probably only got a few days if even two weeks with each other before being separated for God knows how long. But by the time they meet up with each other again, they've supposedly fallen in love. How? There was nothing in the novel that convinced me of their genuine feelings for each other, other than Owen commenting on Emmeline smiling at him more-then she gets kidnapped! They never talked about anything really. They didn't have anything in common and it literally was not until the last chapter in the book that was in Owen's POV that he stopped referring to her people by the derogatory term "dirt-scratcher" (I think this name is a reference to farmers). What kind of guy who loves a woman of a oppressed group of people, insists on calling that group by the worst name for them possible? Like I said, I'm so not convinced.

Another thing I hated was the switching of point of view between Emmeline and Owen. You could tell they were written by the same person and the author didn't label the chapters by the person speaking. It was really confusing.

Another thing that bothered me was some of the writing and terminology. At several points in the novel, Emmeline and Owen refer to the most attractive guy in her village as "the most popular guy in the Flatlands". Number One, who says that during the time of kingdoms?And Number Two, what GUY says that either?
Also the story about the cow queen who first bestowed the gift of chocolate-churning bothered me.
The scene in which the prince and Emmeline team up so that they can get rid of his money and chocolate hungry parents seems so silly and 100% unbelievable.

overall...
Although I thought this was a interesting concept, I felt like the plot and the writing could have been wayyy better. The different character POV's should've been labeled with names, the characters could've been fleshed out more because they all seemed like cardboard cutouts. You know, the ones that have another piece in the back that holds them up. It was like the author tried to make her characters more three-dimensional but failed.