Book Description:
BUBBLES IS BACK! And so is trouble in an all-new adventure featuring Lehigh, Pennsylvania's hairdresser/newspaper reporter Bubbles Yablonsky. Having survived a slip-and-fall on Payless heels, Bubbles catapults off a Caddy in the PolkaFest parade and into the arms of danger as she tracks down the whereabouts of two missing beauty queens while also keeping a mascaraed eye out for her hunka hunka burning love, Stiletto. On hand to help - or maybe hinder - are a couple of septuagenarian survivalists shilling their Die-O-Ramas, an office assistant obsessed with UPS drivers, a dude named Stinky and Josh Simon the billionaire casino owner who just be the knight in shining armor to rescue Bubbles from an aluminum-sided world. Or maybe not. Homemade beauty treatments and recipes featuring authentic Pennsylvania cuisine complement the writing. (It sucks and there's not nearly enough!) The 7th installment in this award-winning (Agatha, Romantic Times) and bestselling series published in seven language will have you smiling with relief that you didn't pay more.
Okay, so when is the next book coming out -dammit! You can't leave us hanging like this without us knowing when our misery will end!
Yes, this book ends on a sort of cliffhanger -now notice I said a "sort of" cliffhanger. I can't tell you much about the story itself, because anything I say is going to be a spoiler!
And let me tell you if you have been reading the entire series you may start out a little disappointed with this book at first. but stick with it-it really is a fantastic entry into this series. I just wonder why it took Ms. Strohmeyer so long to get back to it.
The characters are exactly as I remember them, but Bubbles has grown a bit, Dan is still the ex that I want to smack in the face with an iron frying pan, Sandy is still, well, Sandy and Bubbles Mom and Genevieve are still the same.
We are missing Bubbles daughter Jane who has sone her own way and Stiletto only makes peripheral visits and nothing hot to look forward to. (bummer) The heat has always been good n this series but never lewd or 'dirty' if you know what I mean. No graphic descriptions of body parts or fluids thank you very much!!!
Another interesting thing to note -this series is really a good price -2.99$ for each book -not a bad value for something you might read a second or third time. HOWEVER -not all of the books are n e-book form yet and I really hope they come out that way very soon.
I recommend this series---so much so, that even though I finished the entire series yesterday, I may very well re-read it again when I finish the next 5 books I have on my TBR pile!
Book Description:
Don’t miss this unforgettable debut novel, told in two timelines, about smart fashion, pursuing your dreams, and loving yourself!
FAT.
High school senior Cookie Vonn’s post-graduation dreams include getting out of Phoenix, attending Parsons and becoming the next great fashion designer. But in the world of fashion, being fat is a cardinal sin. It doesn’t help that she’s constantly compared to her supermodel mother—and named after a dessert.
Thanks to her job at a fashion blog, Cookie scores a trip to New York to pitch her portfolio and appeal for a scholarship, but her plans are put on standby when she’s declared too fat to fly. Forced to turn to her BFF for cash, Cookie buys a second seat on the plane. She arrives in the city to find that she’s been replaced by the boss’s daughter, a girl who’s everything she’s not—ultrathin and superrich. Bowing to society’s pressure, she vows to lose weight, get out of the friend zone with her crush, and put her life on track.
SKINNY.
Cookie expected sunshine and rainbows, but nothing about her new life is turning out like she planned. When the fashion designer of the moment offers her what she’s always wanted—an opportunity to live and study in New York—she finds herself in a world full of people more interested in putting women down than dressing them up. Her designs make waves, but her real dream of creating great clothes for people of all sizes seems to grow more distant by the day.
Will she realize that she’s always had the power to make her own dreams come true?
This is going to be a truly difficult review to write for me. Lately, I have needed this genre just to remind myself that I am wonderful just the way I am and had I read the synopsis for this book a little closer, I would have found that it wasn't written the way I expected. One thing that bothered me was the two different timelines and how they were labeled. I took some getting used to, but I managed after a while.
Please don't get me wrong -this was a wonderful book but not, perhaps, for the truly heavy woman (or man) who really loves themselves as they are. Most books of this genre do have to deal with the love/hate relationship of the fat body...it is not something easily written, a fine line the author has to walk. And there lies the issue (mine) with this book -the heroine believes that her life will change and she will get everything she ever wanted if she just lost weight.
There are the usual stereotypes in this novel -the missing father, the high fashion model mother who abandons (for all intents and purposed her daughter) then uses her, the rich and perfect fat shamers at school and work, the regular fat-shamers, the boy that just couldn't speak his mind the best friend that lives half-way across the world and the man who used our heroine.
I did learn a LOT about the high fashion industry and how it does not want to deal with anyone over a size 8-12, I learned a lot about Claire McCardell (enough for me to learn more about her on my own).
What I did not like is the thought that Cookie (our protagonist) did diet and for what I felt are for the wrong things and I'm afraid that other younger girls are going to think the same way the heroine did. However, the reason I gave it a high rating is that Cookie did learn in the end not to care what other's thought and to learn to live life on her own terms.
It was a satisfying and interesting read for me---however, I would not recommend this book to anyone younger than high school (there is sex in this book).
*ARC supplied by the publisher.
