Just Like Beauty

By Lisa Lerner

Book Overview

A darkly comic-and surprisingly sweet-coming-of-age story set in the dystopic suburban near-future It's morning in America. A plague of mutant grasshoppers invades a hopelessly artificial landscape. Bands of teenage boys run amok, and citizens regularly drop dead from toxic exposure or cultish voluntary suicide. And down in the "family nook," fourteen-year-old Edie Stein is training fiercely for her town's annual Feminine Woman of Conscience Pageant, in which adolescent girls compete in the erotic and other womanly arts. Yet no matter how expertly her mother coaches, Edie's having trouble arousing her practice dummy. Her heart's just not in it. Growing up has never been easy. But when the landscape around you has become as surreal as the treacherous emotional terrain within, you might contemplate desperate measures-enrolling in submarine school, running off with the girl next door, doing a Happy Ending. Just Like Beauty is not so much science fiction as a pitch-perfect sendup of the way we live now. In the mold of Don Delillo's White Noise, it offers a trenchant look at where our current enslavement to commodification and technology is taking us. But at its heart it is also a tender and believable portrait of the persistence of love and longing in an increasingly inauthentic world.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374180628
• ISBN13: 9780374180621
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 279 Pages
• Weight: 1.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Brave New World... revisited from the millenium

This is one of the best books I have ever read, but I can understand how many would find it preverse or just too bizarre. You must have an open mind and an understanding of societal influence in order to grasp the concept. When you find yourself appalled by the events in the book, it's more than likely reflective of what's going on in your own world, or the precursor to its happening in the future. It's not so unbelievable that soon there will be widespread violence in all suburbs, a strange fascination and competition with young girl's sexuality, and the physical world itself changing and becoming less accomidating to humanity due to pollution. This is not a book I'd reccomend to someone who would has read and thoroughly enjoyed "The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya sisterhood". It is not meant to cheer you up, it is not meant to tug at your heart, it's mean to make you think.

The Contests We Face--and the Rabbits We Love

A book that talks to all of us, because--man or woman--we all face the beauty contests in our lives, and all confront the choice of killing the rabbits we love for the sake of some Just Like Reward.

Beauty

Ms. Lerner's "just like" world is a two-way mirror-- just slightly warped. She transports the reader with precise descriptions of the not so far off future and with characters we can know and care about. Sometimes sweet and longing, sometimes scary and sad, Just Like Beauty is an a funny and disturbing look at who we are.

I'm not an intellectual but . . .

Okay, I have to admit, I bought this book because the cover looked so fabulous, and it sounded weird and cool. But once I started reading I was gripped. Apocalypse, eco-disasters, futuristic cults--all of that paled in comparison with how much I cared about Edie and her confusion about whether she wanted to be a beauty queen or an eco-terrorist. Lerner makes us see the appeal of both. So in the end I don't know -- maybe you CAN tell a book by its cover.

Highly recommended

Considering its ambitious scope, the Orwellian satire "Just Like Beauty" is a surprisingly enjoyable read. With teenage love (think innocence, beauty, good intentions, etc.) pitted against the outgrowths and least sensible notions of a consumerist, gender-biased society, we're in for a generous helping of righteousness that is well timed and right on the mark. Lerner has crafted a grotesque social landscape inhabited by a cast of sometimes twisted, sometimes touchingly sane characters, all of which have been plucked right from the equally bizarre world we live in. Reading this book has not only restored my faith in the storytelling skills of our generation but also the unambiguous moral defaults, with which we are all born.