kinnari9378c7

I was about *this close* to returning this to the library unfinished. If only! I usually adore cinderella type "makeover" stories. I found it very hard to get any joy out of this one though. The narration is just plain weird. It switches (quite frequently, even mid-scene) back and forth between first person (Jemima) and third person omniscient...except the third person narrator has an attitude and is sort of preachy. If Jemima's like Cinderella, then the narrator could be her fairy godmother, who never shows up to help her out but feels the need to scold Jemima for her bad decisions anyway. Jemima starts off the book as an overweight, miserable, and insecure woman who's in love with her colleague and can't get the job she wants because her manager is a pig who promotes less qualified but more attractive people over her. When she starts up an internet relationship with an American man, she decides to lie, telling him that she's a successful t.v. presenter and sending him a severely edited photo of herself. Jemima makes a decision to lose weight and change her life, but then becomes so obsessed with exercise and restrictive eating that it's clear to everyone reading this book that she has an eating disorder. She's actually described as losing over 100 lbs in three months!! Fortunately for Jemima, no one in the book, including the snarky narrator (who feels the need to reassure the reader that no, she's not anorexic) seems to notice that she has a major problem. Her friends congratulate her and she gets a promotion at work. She flies off to America to meet her hunky internet boyfriend. I kept thinking, "okay but when are we going to get to the downside?" This woman has a serious eating problem! Later in the book she goes on a few binges, but it's brushed off like no big deal. At the end of the book Jemima "makes a decision" to stop being so obsessed with eating and that's that. This part has to be incredibly insulting to anyone that's ever suffered from an eating disorder, I felt. Sure, she's still lonely and her American boyfriend is (of course) not all he's cracked up to be. But really, there are seemingly constant improvements to her life wrought from this destructive behavior. I know that the world is a superficial place, but it's not that superficial (or maybe I'm just not jaded enough?). I also just couldn't find anything compelling about the love interest, Ben. He's constantly fighting off advances from wealthy and powerful women in this book, which I think is supposed to make him endearing but really just made me more and more annoyed with him for never noticing Jemima (not once!) when she was bigger and promptly abandoning her from his thoughts when he doesn't see her everyday. All of this made it extremely hard to buy into the idea that these two people could really love each other. Yeah, I pretty much hated this book! I woudln't recommend it to anyone.

2022-10-29 03:46