The Pretty One by Cheryl Klam

Once upon a time in Highschoollandia there lived a princess and a pauper. Lucy, the everlasting beauty, reigned and thrived and was loved, whereas her sister Megan, the everlasting reject, collected scraps Lucy charitably provided her. The sisters never spoke of the reality of things, but they did get along beautifully in the confines of their own home. Megan thought she could count on Lucy—until she heard Lucy badmouthing her in the school bathroom. She ran, and ran and ran, and in her hurry and carelessness, she got hit by a car. The damage was so severe she needed plastic surgery to reconstruct her face. And the last thing anyone expected as a result of that surgery was for Megan to come out looking miles prettier than Lucy…

I bought this one on premise because, really, how great does that sound? It’s turning an old plot on its head and exploring themes you hear about every day—self-esteem and body-image—in an original way. What’s not to love?

God, so much. I think at some point I had a ten-point list of things I would’ve done to fix this but alas, that’s long-since been lost. (I had better things to do.) Off the top of my head, I can think of two:

The protagonist, Megan, is bordering on too stupid to live. I suppose this is a prime example of showing, not telling, the effects of long-term insecurity: She is completely awkward. Every step she takes, she second guesses herself, as if her entire life had been spent treading on eggshells. I’ll go on a limb here and say this is probably intended because Megan seems like she is supposed to be that tongue-tied sort of girl. But the entire novel drowns under its own saturation of blushing cheeks, sweaty hands, and character/reader hand-holding. At one point someone calls her pretty, a fact she knows is true, and she spends a paragraph debating with herself whether she should thank him or if that’d be too presumptuous.

Look, I don’t mind self-conscious narrators, so much because confidence is the last thing that could be attributed to me, but cut the crap and get to the goddamn point already. It’s not that hard. The entire thing is not unlike Bella’s constant reminders of how dazzling Edward is.

*shudder*

And then there’s the theme of beauty. The world, instead of possessing a moral black and white divide, has only pretty vs ugly. I think it went just a tad too far with it. Like, everything was just a bit too motivated with the quality of someone’s looks that the actual substance beyond someone’s superficial features was overlooked. The novel is about pretty vs ugly, granted, but aren’t those tales supposed to be about the character looking beyond that? Maybe it’s just me.

So, yeah, the negatives far outweigh the positives. I just wish it weren’t nonrefundable. Damn living overseas. D. :(

Delacorte | 356 pages | April 8th, 2008 | Author Site | GoodReads | Amazon