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Just Like Beauty
Just Like Beauty | Lisa Lerner
11 posts | 3 read | 33 to read
A plague of mutant grasshoppers is invading American suburbia. An underground suicide cult is gaining national prominence. Gangs of teenage boys with blow torches run amok. But what really has fourteen-year-old Edie Stein distracted from her town's annual Feminine Woman of Conscience Pageant is Lana Grimaldi, the sexy girl next door. How does a feminine woman of conscience deal with her? Just Like Beauty is a brilliantly inventive blend of adolescent angst and cultural satire set in a disconcertingly not-so-distant future.
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review
Bertha_Mason
Just Like Beauty | Lisa Lerner
Mehso-so

A terrifying mirror of our time; unspeakable daily violence and cruelty, saturated in deep, deep absurdity. The protag's casual acceptance of the violence she faces sharpens the text's silent condemnation and rhetorically asks the reader: "Don't you do the same?" The problem: the text spares the white characters' overt racism its analysis, an odd omission in a story that gives so much time to rightly condemning overt anti-Semitism.

Bertha_Mason Also, WARNING: The sapphic romance does not end happily. 7y
1 like1 comment
quote
Bertha_Mason
Just Like Beauty | Lisa Lerner

"The dressing room is emptying out, cubicles abandoned harum-scarum with Pageant clutter..."

Do minor misuses of idioms annoy anyone else here? "Harum-scarum" means frighteningly aggressive. She seems to have meant something like "pell-mell" or "willy-nilly" or "helter skelter," which make it an easy mistake, and it doesn't affect the quality of the book much for me, but still. I'm so pretentious. :P

blurb
bookriot
Just Like Beauty | Lisa Lerner
post image

#RiotGrams, Day 11: Today's prompt is "underrated read." This amazing 2002 novel set in a dystopian America, where a teen girl is rebelling against participating in a government-mandated beauty pageant and the chaos of the world, is even more important and scary now. ??☠️ -Rioter @Liberty

Crystallinegirl Ooo. I love dystopias! And I'd never heard of this one. Added! 7y
Bertha_Mason I'm reading it now! It's so Night Vale. 7y
113 likes20 stack adds2 comments
blurb
Liberty
Just Like Beauty | Lisa Lerner
post image

#RiotGrams, Day 11: Today's prompt is "underrated read." This amazing 2002 novel set in a dystopian America, where a teen girl is rebelling against participating in a government-mandated beauty pageant and the chaos of the world, is even more important and scary now. ??☠️

92 likes9 stack adds
blurb
Bertha_Mason
Just Like Beauty | Lisa Lerner
This post contains spoilers
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Last eighty pages of the book, and the giant mutant grasshoppers have now figured out how to use tools. What a completely ridiculous and simultaneously terrifying twist.

quote
Bertha_Mason
Just Like Beauty | Lisa Lerner

"Finally she really looks at me, and everything inside my chest tumbles like puppies."

2 likes1 stack add
quote
Bertha_Mason
Just Like Beauty | Lisa Lerner

"It's business as usual in the [high school] infirmary: Nurse Fogg bellowing at the patients to keep it down, her chapped hands full of catheters, feeding tubes, and surgical clamps and saws." ?

Bertha_Mason It's so Night Vale! 7y
2 likes1 comment
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Bertha_Mason
Just Like Beauty | Lisa Lerner

Also the teachers at the protagonist's school use torture devices (including stretching racks, thumbscrews, cattle prods, clubs, public bondage devices, and something called a "microtwisto capacitor") on the students, and it's an odd "old-fashioned" thing worth mentioning when a teacher doesn't. This is all mentioned offhand. DEFINITELY not for the faint of heart.

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Bertha_Mason
Just Like Beauty | Lisa Lerner

Girls have to have gotten their menarche to be eligible for the beauty pageant, and the protagonist hasn't gotten hers yet so her mother puts leeches on her privates because she thinks that will bring it on. This book is DEFINITELY not for the faint of heart. D:

batsy Omg 😰 7y
2 likes1 comment
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Bertha_Mason
Just Like Beauty | Lisa Lerner

I was worried this might be The Core of the Sun all over again, but thankfully it doesn't take itself so seriously.

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Bertha_Mason
Just Like Beauty | Lisa Lerner

My current Open Library read. It opens with the protagonist's mother putting her through foreplay drills with a blowup doll, for the "Electric Polyrubber Man" event in the upcoming national beauty pageant. In this event, the preteen contestants demonstrate their sex skills on a dummy modeled after a cisgender man. Points for opening with the vomit factor.