Just Like Beauty: A Novel [Hardcover]

Lisa Lerner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2002

A darkly comic-and surprisingly sweet-coming-of-age story set in the dystopic suburban near-future

It's morning in America. A plague of mutant grasshoppers invades a hopelessly artificial landscape. Bands of teenage boys run amok, and citizens regularly drop dead from toxic exposure or cultish voluntary suicide. And down in the "family nook," fourteen-year-old Edie Stein is training fiercely for her town's annual Feminine Woman of Conscience Pageant, in which adolescent girls compete in the erotic and other womanly arts. Yet no matter how expertly her mother coaches, Edie's having trouble arousing her practice dummy. Her heart's just not in it.

Growing up has never been easy. But when the landscape around you has become as surreal as the treacherous emotional terrain within, you might contemplate desperate measures-enrolling in submarine school, running off with the girl next door, doing a Happy Ending.

Just Like Beauty is not so much science fiction as a pitch-perfect sendup of the way we live now. In the mold of Don Delillo's White Noise, it offers a trenchant look at where our current enslavement to commodification and technology is taking us. But at its heart it is also a tender and believable portrait of the persistence of love and longing in an increasingly inauthentic world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Edie Stein may be a 14-year-old with common adolescent concerns, but the rites of passage in the world she lives in are even more warped than the ones we know. Set in a dystopic American suburbia of the near future, this inventive comic novel opens just six months before Edie is scheduled to compete in the annual Feminine Woman of Conscience Pageant a public ritual in which girls must not only display "Better Person Skills" and their knowledge of chemical substances but also simulate sex with the Electric Polyrubber Man and sacrifice trained rabbits and sew them into muffs. Trained assiduously by her unstable pill-popping mother, Edie wants to triumph. Yet she is conflicted about where she stands she hasn't yet started her period, technically rendering her ineligible for the pageant and where she wants to go. Simulated sex doesn't compare to her feelings for Lana Grimaldi, the sexy and rebellious girl next door. And dealing with her estranged parents sometimes makes her just want to run away and join submarine school. Meanwhile, as she and the other contestants get closer to pageant day, they must contend with the constant harassment from gangs of local boys known as the Blow Torchers and an alarming invasion of chemically amped-up grasshoppers. Initially, the futuristic brand-naming (Just Like Meat Planet restaurants, Just Like Beans, Sin Concealer makeup) is trying, but eventually Lerner relaxes her send-up showcasing and lets her characterizations of Edie and her family and friends shine through. Edie's struggles to forge a unique identity lead her to concoct a winning triumph all her own, and readers will be engaged by her utterly believable pluck in this most unusual coming-of-age debut. Agent, Jane Gelfman.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Lerner's futurist first novel is set in Deansville, a suburban hell of the highest order. Grasshoppers the size of cats have invaded, breast cancer afflicts one in two, and a suicide cult called Happy Endings is luring folks to "move on to something better." Still, people marry, have children, and adapt to environmental changes. Enter Edie Stein, a 14 year old whose desire to please her mother, a former Mulch Queen, has made her a top contender in the Feminine Woman of Conscience pageant. Against her better judgment, she is learning the erotic arts by practicing on Electric Polyrubber Man, a blow-up doll. What's more, she's studying other "gender appropriate" skills, from how to walk seductively to how to make a muff from a skinned rabbit. But despite high scores in the preliminaries, Edie is worried. Her growing attraction to Lana Grimaldi, coupled with an increasing awareness of her mother's shortcomings, is confusing and scary. What follows is a remarkably conventional, if often touching, coming-of-age story. Surreal yet heartfelt, the novel probes what it means to be a good daughter and conscientious citizen. Recommended for all libraries. Eleanor J. Bader, Eugene Lang Coll., Brooklyn, NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (January 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374180628
• ISBN-13: 978-0374180621
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,384,379 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars , August 19, 2005

By 

Reader - See all my reviews

This review is from: Just Like Beauty: A Novel (Paperback)

I read a great review on this book and absolutely had to buy it. It's Lisa Lerner's first novel. It is set in the future in a society that is just kooky enough to seem simultaneously unrealistic and plausible. Edie Stein is participating in an annual "Feminine Woman of Conscience Pageant", a pageant that is so reputable that successful enrollment is seen as a high honor. It is no ordinary pageant though, to win you have to pass all sorts of strange tests. The pageant, in short, delivers as a winner any girl that can embody all the feminine qualities that would make her desirable to a man. Edie enters the pageant to make her mother happy and, although she doesn't admit it, she secretly wants to win - but doesn't know how she is going to kill her pet rabbit, in the "Sacrificial Rabbit" event (I won't spoil it, but you won't be disappointed in her decision). There's another problem that Edie wonders about, she's falling for her next door neighbor, Lana. Lana is against the pageant and all that it stands for. Edie is aware of the superficiality of it too but plays along to please her mother. Because of her contestant status, being outside (getting to school, etc.) becomes an obstacle course for Edie and any other enrolled contestant. A group of school bullies (that, I did not realize until later in the book, were employed by the Pageant committee - making the whole idea of the Pageant even more sinister) hunt with an aim to hurt or even kill (I think, although none do) the contestants so that they are rendered ineligible to compete. There's some dark stuff in this book but all in all, its hilarious and, above all, mocking of a society that has become so artificial that even food, for example, bread (called, "Just Like Bread" in the book), is only related to the real thing by being "Just Like" it.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I'm not an intellectual but . . ., January 23, 2002

By 

wanda brown - See all my reviews

This review is from: Just Like Beauty: A Novel (Hardcover)

Okay, I have to admit, I bought this book because the cover looked so fabulous, and it sounded weird and cool. But once I started reading I was gripped. Apocalypse, eco-disasters, futuristic cults--all of that paled in comparison with how much I cared about Edie and her confusion about whether she wanted to be a beauty queen or an eco-terrorist. Lerner makes us see the appeal of both. So in the end I don't know -- maybe you CAN tell a book by its cover.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended, January 8, 2002

By 

Lakkaree Spekk (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Just Like Beauty: A Novel (Hardcover)

Considering its ambitious scope, the Orwellian satire "Just Like Beauty" is a surprisingly enjoyable read. With teenage love (think innocence, beauty, good intentions, etc.) pitted against the outgrowths and least sensible notions of a consumerist, gender-biased society, we're in for a generous helping of righteousness that is well timed and right on the mark. Lerner has crafted a grotesque social landscape inhabited by a cast of sometimes twisted, sometimes touchingly sane characters, all of which have been plucked right from the equally bizarre world we live in. Reading this book has not only restored my faith in the storytelling skills of our generation but also the unambiguous moral defaults, with which we are all born.