Author: Tyra Banks
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Rating: WORTHY!
erratum:
p234 "Besides the four of them and Zarpessa and Chaste, Tookie recognized only two other girls in the room, tear-streaked Desperada." I have no idea what that means or if it's even English!
Fifteen year old Tookie De La Crème is one of the most awkward teens ever, virtually invisible to her peers because she's so unremarkable - or perhaps not that she's unremarkable, but such an "ugly duckling" that people would prefer to ignore her, given a choice. including her own mother, creamy, whose real name I can now reveal is Cremalatta Defacake De La Crème. It’s not hard to see that this character is modeled(!) on Banks herself, who went through such a phase at about that age. Tookie is tall, gangly, has large feet and head, mismatched eyes, and really unmanageable hair. Her best friend Lizzie lives in a tree and wants to leave town in an Exodus. The bizarre world in which both of them exist, Metopia (with the emphasis on me) is firmly rooted in planet satire.
This entire world is focused solely on modeling, with every young girl desperate to twin a place in Modelland - spots which are few and far between and handed out rather like the golden tickets of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but in a much more twisted, er, fashion. Once there, girls have an opportunity to become an Intoxibella -a super-powered model. Entirely in keeping with the bizarre nature of the novel, Tookie ends-up getting a place at Modelland and bonds with three other misfit girls whom she meets on the way there: big-bodied girl Dylan, petite-sized Shiraz, and albino Piper.
When this year's T-DOD (The Day of Discovery) is announced, the day when girls might be picked for Modelland, Tookie gets to see up close the 7Seven who are seven models whose description can only be fulfilled by seven words each beginning with 'S'. Each has a super power. Evanjalinda's is to be a chameleon, Simone's is that she can duplicate herself. Bev Jo's is that she reverts to seventeen every time she reaches her thirtieth birthday. Leemora can make people buy things. Sinndeesi is skilled at seduction. Katoocha can see into the future of fashion. Exodus can teleport, but none of the seven can do all seven things, and therefore there are no Triple7s - not since superstar Intoxibella model Ci~L (seal or cielle) mysteriously disappeared. But directly meeting the teleported Exodus during this exhibition, triggers deep emotions in Tookie, who resolves to exodus with Lizzie herself.
It can be no spoiler to reveal that Tookie is taken instead of her sister Myrracle (who has been groomed her entire life fro Modelland), but the "scout" who takes Tookie also has other stops on her agenda. She picks up Dylan, who works at the city-sized store call Bou-Big-Tique, and then she flashes over to the city of Canne Del Abra (the candle-making capital, the name of which I found hilarious) to locate Shiraz Shiraz, and finally to the domed city of SansColor where Piper the not-a-princess is located. The description of how these girls are picked up and transported is quite mind-blowing, particularly when they reach Modelland and go through the admissions procedure. It’s at this point that we realize that their Scout is actually Ci~L in disguise, and who is following her own agenda, and not that of Modelland at all. This part was entertaining, even intriguing, but I'm really not so sure about the writing which depicted the conversation going on throughout this. It was a bit extreme. I found myself hoping that this doesn’t go on interminably, because it would definitely and adversely affect my enjoyment of this novel!
I also found myself asking: if this novel had been written in exactly this way, down to the last crossed 't' and dotted 'i', and submitted by someone who was not an international supermodel, then would it ever have had even the slightest chance of being accepted? My gut response is a definite and resounding "No way in Hell!" That's the problem with Big Publishing - it’s not so much what you write, it’s who you know and how you're known, so be ever grateful that we have independents and self-publishing available to us. I know I keep arguing this case, as I keep arguing that prologues need to be abolished, but it’s not just me. Check out these two references, the first of which shows that literary agents agree with me on prologues, and the second of which shows that self publishing (by Amazon with its effective monopoly called Create Space) is big, but independent publishing is even bigger. Hope is not lost!
So the first day of initiation has the models go through a good-cop/bad-cop kind of a deal. I think Banks set this up to be analogous to the painful process through which young girls go to get into modeling: having to put up with people being hyper-critical about their appearance, and having to starve themselves to look anorexic enough to be featured in the photo-shoots. These girls are made-up to look beautiful, but then their bodies appear to quickly age, and fester, and rot. At this point doors appear, allowing the girls to quit the agency and go home, if they wish. They're supposed to learn from this never to share make-up! A dozen or so do at each stage. A similar stage follows, but in this one, the girls get to wear gorgeous jewelery only to have this jewelery "turn on them": the necklaces, for example, try to strangle them. They're supposed to learn from the that they should only buy originals, never knock-offs. By this means, the faint-of-heart are weeded from the more stout-hearted.
Tookie and her friends survive this weeding-out process with Tookie's steadfastness to guide them, but I have to say that I think that Banks rather dropped the ball here. Tookie, who never indicated that she really cared about Modelland, even though she idolized Ci~L, has pretty much dumped her bestie, Lizzie, at this point. She had the chance, right there, to leave Modelland, go find Lizzie, and leg-it it out of town without anyone being any the wiser, yet she chose to stay with her new friends and her opportunity, and in doing so has quite effectively abandoned Lizzie. This makes me dislike Tookie, and it isn't a good message to send to young girls, although it is what a lot of young women (and men) do: abandon their friends to seek fame and fortune through modeling, popular music, or acting, and in a world where there is such a massive divide between rich and poor, particularly in a nation like the USA, one can hardly blame a person for trying to find a route to speedy riches; though one can hold them responsible for exactly how they pursue their dream.
One problem with reading an inventive and playful novel like this is that you're never quite sure if something odd that you read is a mistake or intentional, or if something humorous was intentional or accidental, such as this part on page 309:
..."I'll see you soon, but now I have to go make a, uh, a special deposit, yep, yep."
"Ew," Chaste snickered. "I can only imagine what kind of deposit he's talking about."
"MattJoe ignored her and pressed a button under his stool...""
So I finished this and I'm willing to recommend this if you like your novel cuh-ray-zee, which this definitely is. I was impressed by the playfulness and inventiveness which Banks shows, and impressed by her solo effort. I have to say, though, that this novel is too long. It needed to be shorter by about two hundred pages, because parts of it were downright boring and skippable. I know that if the author had been anyone but a supermodel, the publisher would have turned this down, or at best demanded edits up the wazoo.
It just goes to show what you can get away with if you are who you are, and have access (as Banks did when writing this) to a series of luxury hotels in which to work, and high class restaurants which will indulge you spending eight straight hours there. Joanne Rowling never had that luxury when she created Harry Potter. Will Smith's son would never have hit the big time had he not been Will Smith's son. Christopher Rice would hardly have had an in to publishing his novels had he not been the son of Anne Rice. Just be grateful for self-publishing, I say, so the rest of us can finally get a fair shot!
