AUDIOBOOK
About
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.
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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Reviews
"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
"More comic relief than feminist manifesto…weird, wacky, and worth it."
San Diego Union