Review: Everyone is Beautiful by Katherine Center

Title: Everyone is Beautiful
Author: Katherine Center
Pages: 256
Publisher: Ballantine Books (February 17, 2009)
Genre: Fiction / Chic lit
Edition: Received from Dorothy of Pump Up Your Book Promotion



Note: I hope you will stop by on Monday, when I'll have a guest post from the author of Everyone is Beautiful, Katherine Center.

Perfect for : Personal reading, book club read, sharing with a good friend

In a nutshell: Its not often that I find myself enthusiastically nodding my head in agreement to something I'm reading in a fiction book, but there was just something about this book that made me do a double-take! Either the author has experienced life in a similar way that I have, or she has done her homework! Katherine Center has written a beautiful book that is full of life, and not just some fantasy life, but a real life, and one that I can relate to, with the perfect amount of reality and humor! Any mom out there will appreciate this book, both for the challenges that children and family life provides, and for the way we see ourselves. This is a truly wonderful story of a woman who is first and foremost a wife and mom, and now she is trying to re-discover herself as well. Let this beautifully written story help you to re-evaluate life by taking a look into the life of Lanie, and learning to look at life from a beautiful perspective, and the fact that sometimes you have to take a step back and look at the special things in your life from another angle. Everyone is Beautiful should be read by. . . EVERYONE!

Extended Review:
Characters: With a friend like Amanda to periodically surprise her and challenge her thinking, Nora, the "mean witch" from the apartment below theirs, and a husband to love who just might be a little too focused at times, you will absolutely love Lanie Coates and the characters she interacts with. Lanie, Peter, the boys, Nora, Josh, Amanda . . . each person is beautiful in their own way.

Story-Line: Lanie seems to be a smart woman who has become derailed from herself. She lives for her husband and kids, and hasn't really taken the time to focus on herself. The family moves to support her husband's job, and she starts to find ways to re-focus on herself a little (going to the gym, enrolling in a photography class).

Readability: This book has the perfect mix of life (both the ups and the downs) and humor. Easy to read, and hard to put down!

Overall: The story is a life-affirming one, that will help you to re-focus on the things that are really important in life. I highly encourage you to get a copy of this book, and share it with the women in your life! Show them how beautiful they really are.

From Amazon:
Lanie Coates’s life is spinning out of control. She’s piled everything she owns into a U-Haul and driven with her husband, Peter, and their three little boys from their cozy Texas home to a multiflight walkup in the Northeast. She’s left behind family, friends, and a comfortable life–all so her husband can realize his dream of becoming a professional musician. But somewhere in the eye of her personal hurricane, it hits Lanie that she once had dreams too. If only she could remember what they were.

These days, Lanie always seems to rank herself dead last–and when another mom accidentally criticizes her appearance, it’s the final straw. Fifteen years, three babies, and more pounds than she’s willing to count since the day she said “I do,” Lanie longs desperately to feel like her old self again. It’s time to rise up, fish her moxie out of the diaper pail, and find the woman she was before motherhood capsized her entire existence.

Lanie sets change in motion–joining a gym, signing up for photography classes, and finding a new best friend. But she also creates waves that come to threaten her whole life. In the end, Lanie must figure out once and for all how to find herself without losing everything else in the process.

Katherine Center’s Everyone Is Beautiful is a hugely entertaining, poignant, and charming new novel about what happens after happily ever after: how a woman learns to fall in love with her husband–and her entire life–all over again.

About the Author: (from Amazon)
Katherine Center is the author of The Bright Side of Disaster. She graduated from Vassar College, where she won the Vassar College Fiction Prize, and received an MA in fiction from the University of Houston. She served as fiction co-editor for the literary magazine Gulf Coast, and her graduate thesis, Peepshow, a collection of stories, was a finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. A former freelance writer and teacher, she lives in Houston with her husband and two young children.

www.katherinecenter.com



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Necromancy Never Pays