Customer Reviews

It's My Body: And I'll Cry If I Want to

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It's My Body And I'll Cry If I Want To by Sharleen Jonasson is a fast-paced, wry, and cruelly cynical look at the not-too-distant future of the beauty industry. A broken-down lapsed feminist is given a seemingly plumb freelance investigative journalism assignment - to infiltrate an elite beauty clinic and learn about a potentially deadly new treatment. Money, power, greed, and agendas spiral out of control in this dark and exciting story.

I couldn't wait to read this book, as it addresses the frequent questions of the middle-aged woman, who abhors the ravages of time on her physical beauty. So, when the protagonist, Beth, secretly infiltrates a private beauty institute, in order to uncover a fraudulent operation, I admit it was, at times, introspectrive and clever. But, the ending is a total disappointment and contrived. I wouldn't recommend it to any of my "aging" acquaintances.

Is there a woman alive who's never looked in the mirror and felt inadequate? "Take back the mirror" by reading this novel that skewers the beauty industry with tongue-in-cheek humor, a rollicking plot, and believable, likeable characters. It's not preachy or angry, but still manages to seriously examine the effect of the media and the beauty industry on how we (women) feel about ourselves. I thought the novel was highly entertaining as a story, and also very thought-provoking -- the kind of book you keep thinking about long after you put it down.

If you're looking for a clever, socially conscious mystery that is funny without being frivolous and feminist without being doctrinaire, you've come to the right place. In Beth Middleton, author Sharleen Jonasson has created a "woman of a certain age" who is smart, sassy, and endearingly disheartened at her (frequent) glimpses of herself in baggy-ass sweats. When the story opens, Beth has hit a low point in her life: she and her husband have split, her teenage daughter is pierced in more places than she can count, and her work as a consultant bores her. During lonely nights at home she scours the fridge for food and drink, or works out on her annoyingly articulate exercise machine, which exhorts her to cut down on her fats even as she eyes the ice cream. Truth is, Beth's relationship to Beauty has always been ambivalent. So no one is more surprised than she is when an unusual assignment takes her to an island spa/resort (a former leper colony) where she finds herself investigating, not only a possible beauty industry scam, but also, her own long-standing and frequently contradictory beliefs about appearance and its importance in a woman's life. With rich characterisation and deft turns of plot, It's My Body and I'll Cry if I Want To offers a witty, satirical take on a serious social issue.

Is there a woman alive who's never looked in the mirror and felt inadequate? "Take back the mirror" by reading this novel that skewers the beauty industry with tongue-in-cheek humor and a rollicking plot. It's not preachy or angry, but still manages to seriously examine the issues around the effect of the media and the beauty industry on how we women feel about ourselves. The novel is highly entertaining as a story, and because of the unique way it treats the pursuit of beauty, you'll keep thinking about this book long after you put it down.

Middle aged writer Beth Middleton wonders how her life fell into some sort of disastrous free fall. Her husband has left her after years of marriage, leaving her in financial trouble and raising their troubled angry fourteen-year-old mostly by herself. She hates her work, which barely pays the recurring bills and insures she ignores any self-indulgent pampering that she might fantasize.

A potential client Darby representing Perceived Ugliness Syndrome asks Beth to infiltrate The Beauty Institute to learn the secret of a new treatment to make women so beautiful that PUS believes it includes a side effect of making females look perfect in their coffins. Though wary, Beth needs cash and agrees to go deep undercover by posing as a customer of the Institute. Beth receives the full treatment until she feels competent to pen an article that ironically describes the mirror contradictions of the beauty industry. However, everything changes when she accidentally learns the secret of the new treatment, as nothing is what it seems in a world where beauty is skin deep.

IT'S MY BODY AND I'LL CRY IF I WANT TO is a delightful satire that rips the skin off the multi-zillion dollar beauty industry. Beth is an uplifting individual as she struggles to survive in a world in which beauty is everything while one's original DNA is too ugly to consider. The fast-paced story line is no powder puff as Sharleen Jonasson intelligently furbishes a delightfully amusing amateur sleuth industrial espionage tale that uses no gloss or silicon yet subtly applies cosmetics to condemn an industry.

Harriet Klausner