Just like Beauty is a brilliantly inventive debut novel that blends adolescent angst and cultural satire and is set in a disconcertingly not-so-distant future complete with high-tech food, mutant animals, socially sanctioned violence, and despoliation of the planet. This surprising combination gives author Lisa Lerner a fresh and funny way to explore family dynamics, gender roles, competitiveness, and the "beauty myth" in a society that keeps reinventing them anew for each generation.
A plague of mutant grasshoppers is invading American suburbia. An underground suicide cult is gaining national prominence. Gangs of teenage boys with blow torches run amok. But what really has fourteen-year-old Edie Stein distracted from her town's annual Feminine Woman of Conscience Pageant is Lana Grimaldi, the sexy girl next door. How does a feminine woman of conscience deal with her?
Just like Beauty offers a comically trenchant look at where our culture is heading and the absurdity that passes for ordinary.
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“Captivating…a work of striking lyricism and jittery energy…Lerner
writes in a prose style that is intricate, poetic, and full of surprises…In a
lesser writer’s hands, such an exaggerated view of womanhood might have seemed
silly or unbelievable. But Lerner has the gifts to make it all work—the girls
seem real, and you want them to escape.”
—
New York Times Book Review