A beach or balcony read is a tricky thing to get right – it should be a refreshing, frothy little thing, not too heavy (basically like a good cocktail), but then, not dumb, too sweet or too full of cliches. I like my beach reads clever, with a bit of snark, and if you throw in a captivating heroine, I’m sold. Lo and behold, I found just that – best beach book of 2018. AND it takes place at a woman’s mag in NYC, which means it’s full of thinly veiled allusions, fashion and beauty chatter.
The book
I’ll eat when I’m dead, by Barbara Bourland. Amazon (here), I read it on Kindle ($9.99). And don’t worry, it’s not pro-ana. It’s also not about eating disorders.
The story
Assistant editor Hillary Whitney’s death in an office of Vogue-like RAGE magazine has been ruled as a heart attack caused by an eating disorder. But both rising NYPD cop Mark Hutton and Hillary’s friends, editors Cat Ono and Bess Bonner start to dig deeper and discover finally what lies beneath Hillary’s untimely death.
What’s really going on
See, I’d really, really love to giggle and scream about the plot twist and ultimately, the reason why I think this novel is great reading material to a beauty lover, but I just can’t. You have to find that out for yourself, and I guarantee you, the irony of it won’t be lost on any beauty junkie.
Instead, I can tell you why I loved the book and tore through it – I liked Cat. I couldn’t have cared less if she and Mark got together or not, but her earnestness and stubborn insistence that fashion is important, and that she wants to use her position at RAGE to actually move perceptions of women around – that resonated with me. This, of course, can be read as satire, especially as Cat does a 360 later on and, for a short time, becomes a social media star with all that entails – freebies, drugs, pressure, start-ups, new social media channels. (Looking, she calls it, like a dictators’ mistress – and can’t we all picture that from the oodles of fashion influencers we see everywhere?!)
You can, as well, enjoy that for a deviation of The Devil Wears Prada, minus the small-town-girl schtick and the arc of self-realisation that Andy goes through. Cat comes from a small town, but she loves fashion front and centre, never having that outsider view Andy has. I’d be deeply uncomfortable to hang out with Cat and her clique of designer wearing, gold leaf makeup loving, drinking and partying clique. I would admire them nevertheless. (Which places me and most readers cleverly in Andy’s shoes.)
Recommended?
If you enjoy thinly veiled digs at the magazine crowd, like a good murder mystery and characters named Whig Beaton Molton-Mauve Lucas, you can’t go wrong with this one.
1 Comment