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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An unusual premise ...., September 22, 2005
This review is from: A Little Change of Face (Red Dress Ink Novels) (Paperback)
A LITTLE CHANGE OF FACE by Lauren Baratz-Logsted
September 22, 2005
Amazon Rating: 4/5 stars
In A LITTLE CHANGE OF FACE by Lauren Baratz-Logsted, a woman decides to change her image from a beauty to a plain Jane, to see if she can attract a man not for her looks, but for what is inside.
This was my introduction to Baratz-Logsted's books, and I have to say I enjoyed this one. A LITTLE CHANGE OF FACE is not your typical chick lit novel. The premise is a bit off the wall, but I feel that the author made it work. Scarlett Jane Stein has always been known for her good looks and great body, but she's tired of being judged by her appearances. She decides it's time to make a change, so she goes from beautiful to plain Jane, even changing her job and moving to a new town to complete the process.
As Lettie Shaw, she is now a dowdy old maid, and she is no longer attracting the people she did in the past when she was a beauty. With the help of her `default' best friend Pam, Lettie is as plain as can be.
Scarlett (Lettie) finds out what it's like to live like the other half - to have to make an impression on other people without having to use her body. But she also learns a bit about friendship and people through this experiment. This was chick lit with a little bit more, and A LITTLE CHANGE OF FACE may be a book that not everyone will "get", but I felt it was a well-written book, very witty and funny, and will be reading the rest of Lauren's books in the near future.
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9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
an unsuccessful attempt at depth, September 26, 2005
This review is from: A Little Change of Face (Red Dress Ink Novels) (Paperback)
The premise of "A Little Change of Face" is that beautiful, confident Scarlett receives too much attention from men, so she alters her appearance to be less attractive. Her goal is to find out whether men are really interested in her, or just attracted by her looks.
The first problem with all this is that there's no antithesis. Nobody ever really believes - nobody ever even argues, and I can't think of any reason why they should - that men will *not* stop constantly hitting on Scarlett, and buying her drinks in bars and asking her out under no provocation, if she cuts her hair very short, wears ugly glasses, and dons long, baggy dresses to hide her gorgeous figure. From the beginning, the novel conflates this sort of empty and surface-oriented attention with the (generally) deeper regard signified by friendship and real romantic interest. Even Scarlett seems to have no opinon at all on the subject; she seems barely notice the attention she receives, and she has no boyfriend or close male friend at the start of the novel to give another perspective.
So Scarlett goes through a sort of reverse physical blossoming. In the process she changes her name to Lettie, sabotages her career by moving to a lower-level position in a different town, and gives up her condominium to rent a less showy home. She decides to revise not only her appearance but her entire personality, remaking herself as the self-effacing, unglamorous person she imagines a dowdy, bespectacled Lettie would be. This explicit assumption that a less beautiful woman would be less outgoing and sociable is a circular proof of the hypothesis that as an average-looking woman Scarlett will receive less notice. She goes through the usual contortions of trying to attract the most gorgeous and shallow of the men she meets and - in a bit of poetic justice apparently unnoticed by its recipient - manages to develop, for the first time, a personality not based on long hair and big breasts.
Whatever "A Little Change of Face" is supposed to be, it fails. Its agenda - which is both overworked and unpleasant - hampers its enjoyability as fluff. But its desire to be fluff (in accordance with its Red Dress Ink label) hinders its ability to be interesting in any other way. This is really too bad, as the author is obviously talented. She manages to turn a shell of a plot and a few barely-there characters into a marginally pleasant, absorbing three-hundred page book. And she has certainly tapped into some interesting questions of style versus substance, how much of who we are is influenced by how we look, and the importance of physicality to self-concept and our interactions with friends, coworkers, and lovers. Few novels manage to wrestle successfully with this issue, though, and most of them are much more complex than this immature anti-Cinderella tale.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Little Change of Face, Indeed, June 11, 2006
This review is from: A Little Change of Face (Red Dress Ink Novels) (Paperback)
This is my second of Lauren's novels to read, and I'm beginning to know what to expect from her -- gleeful wit, sweet yet wacky heroines, and characters who do the most illogical things for very logical reasons. With creations that lie in that intersection between completely relatable and unbelievably insane, we laugh and sympathize with her protagonists even as we gawk in shock at their actions. A Little Change of Face is no different, the main character, tired of superficial attention for being so beautiful decides to give herself an inverted makeover and see how her life changes. Along her adventure, we see how the protagonist, Scarlett, and her alter-ego, Lettie hierarchize her best friends (the real best friend, the default best friend) as many women secretly do, get a satiracal view into pseudo-intellectual women's books clubs, and are privty to her by turns insightful, juvenile, and keyed-up reactions to men. It is the treatment of Lettie's friends that seems to draw the most flack in this book. If it matters, I am Black, among other things, and I found T.B. to be satire, which means, if you think her role in the book as the non-standard English talking accessory is racist, you're right! Lauren is showing how the use of minority characters as marginalized, cliched stereotypes is wrong, so she names the character T.B. so that we acknowledge the character as an unjust creation. It would be more racist to have called the character Susan or Molly and acted as if her stereotypical behavior was meant as realism -- like, for example, the indigenous and black people in the works of Isabel Allende. Then we would too be a party to racist behavior by reading the book without any sense of the problematic. I suggest that people who don't like this book b/c of T.B. watch Spike Lee's Bamboozled. This black director creates a blackface show in his movie not to say blackface is okay but to skewer, through satire, stereotypical black television. This book is indeed a little change of face, it's warm, witty, joyful chick-lit that decides to get a bit political. A worthy read.
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