101 things to do before you Diet by Mimi Spencer.

The full title of this book is 101 things to do before you diet because looking great isn’t just about losing weight.

I picked up this book expecting a list of things that would deemphasize weight loss. You know what I mean. The title says that looking great isn’t about losing weight. So naturally, I thought the book would not be about losing weight and about loving the skin you are in. I was wrong. The book was absolutely about losing weight in everyway. It wasn’t about feeling good in your own skin, it was about the path of least resistance towards looking, feeling, and eventually being thinner.

Quite a few of the 101 things were just style tips to distract you from hating yourself. They were also awfully specific. Tips like blow dry your hair, wear heels, and wear opaque black panty hose were on the list. These are not tips that people need when they are told to find their own style and love the unique and wonderful person they are. These are the tips that are told when someone thinks that there is a uniform right and wrong for everyone. The right, of course, being skinny, and the wrong, of course, being happy for the person you are without changing a single thing.

The whole chapter two was about how to eat. I skipped a lot of this section. The author talked blood sugar, hormone levels, the importance of breakfast, and eating healthy food. For a self proclaimed not-diet book, this section was all about how to change eating habits to specifically lose weight. There was nothing about eating great to feel great, it was about eating great to lose weight. This chapter made this book a diet book. The only reason they couldn’t call this a diet book proper was because this chapter was extremely ill informed. She off handedly mentioned that one could try the raw food diet as a tip. You would need supplements, maybe, the author doesn’t know.  After reading that, I felt like I could take these tips with a grain of salt.

There was another chapter on exercise. I felt like I had to skim this section as well. She didn’t talk about exercise for fun, happiness, and new life experiences. She broke exercise down into calories. Truthfully, people that think about exercise in a healthy way do not do that. Sad joggers think about calories, not happy ones. This chapter also made me think that this not-diet book was actually quite thinly veiled.

The author is very obviously a magazine contributor. She obsesses about weight, beauty, and glamour in her own life and these insecurities are evident on every page of this book. She skims across useless tips and over the surface of deep topics at the same depth as, well, a magazine would. I’d say to get equally good content, you should pick up an issue of Cosmopoltion or Redbook. At least there would be pictures.

What I did for Love by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

I was looking for something specific  while browsing through my local library romance rack. I wanted something with a wedding about young star crossed millionaires. I didn’t want the book to be about Christmas, and I didn’t want it to be about cowboys. I wanted something about celebrity and glamour. This book fit the bill.

The book is about a former sitcom actress and recent divorcee Georgie York. She is tore up about how her handsome actor husband, Lance, left her for a more glamorous actress. Bram Shepard costarred with Georgie back in the good ‘ol days but has since been ruined professionally by his own debaucherous nature. Georgie has lingering resentment about how his bad behavior led to the canceling of their show. He also callously played with her emotions in an unforgivable deflowering episode in their youth. One deus ex machine later they find themselves married the morning after a possibly drugging incident in Las Vegas. They decide to stay married because of paparazzi hounding and bad press. They decided one year of marriage would not look suspicious, and Georgie offered to pay Bram for his involvement. Hate and repulsion turn into respect, respect turns into lust, lust leads to sex, and after a second deus ex machine involving a SARS quarantine with ex-husband Lance and new wife, sex, professional development, and standing up to ones ex husband turned into love.

The description of Georgie matched a young Julia Roberts but the incident with her ex husband sounded overly similar to the Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie love triangle. The description of Bram matched Chase from Gossip Girl. The character descriptions relating to famous people felt a bit thin actually.

 I really enjoyed the book. The character description was sufficiently glamorous, and I ate up every word. It wasn’t as glamorous as Adored by Tilly Bagshawe, but the wealth and celebrity were juicy.

The writing was very good. The book flowed with character consistency and descriptive scenes. This wasn’t like the awkward scenes and hand motions evidenced in The Princess Bride. Sure, I had a feeling that the author might have watched the Great Gatsby before writing the quarantine scene, but there is nothing wrong with having modern influences. It was sort of topical, like these characters live in a world much similar to my own.

My only qualm about the writing is that it seemed like the only thing that moved the plot forward were these little improbable setups. It is much easier to make characters confront their problems when they are forced to be in a room together for whatever reason. Sure, this story could not present the conflicted feelings about falling in love with someone you are already married to like Georgie and Bram finding themselves married after a morning after.  I forgave the first time. The second plot device with the quarantine was paper thin.

The sex was descriptive, copious, and non-repetitive. Repetition is a problem these romance novels seem to have. People can only draw on their own experiences for things like this, so it makes sense that people fixate on different part of the experience. Like, in the princess bride, it was so breast centric that every instance of sex was almost the same. That was not a problem here. Sure, there was a lot of opening-her-thighs, but on the most part, it didn’t seem like a copy paste of the previous incident.

There were three weddings in this book. The first occurred off stage ala Britney in Vegas. The second occurred for the press in a Great Gatsby inspired 1920’s cathedral. The third in the final pages was the only “real” marriage with just a friend and a few family members. The third was probably the wedding ceremony implied by the cover. I am glad they included that because after reading the part about the vegas wedding, I felt like I was being deceived by the cover ala The Princess Bride.

Near the middle of the book when the characters start to have sex and regularly share their marriage bed, I realized that they should just stay married. But the characters really wanted to split up, and I had no idea why they would do that. They were in a monogamous relationship where they help eachother with their careers! It couldn’t really get better than that. I suppose that is why people write fiction about these sorts of things, so you can get personally invested in a strange situation. That is also probably a credit to the author, to manipulate my feelings this way.

Overall, I recommend this book if you want to take a break from serious literature and indulge in a delightful confection of a book.