by Jennifer McGill-Sadera
Genre: Dark Contemporary
Age Category: New Adult
Release Date: September 2013
Blurb:
Nobody's perfect. Except Lia Copeland. She's flawless. And worshipped. And hated. From her perfectly proportioned figure and enviable bone structure to her instinctual talent for clothing design and cavalier attitude, Lia's the woman every other woman wants to be and every man wants to have. Catapulted from sigh-maker in the high-school halls to superstardom in the fashion world, she makes it look easy. A girl like that has everything; every reason to be happy. Then why does Lia Copeland just want everyone to leave her the hell alone?
A story about the choices made in the wake of travail and tragedy, it explores relationships with all their messy and marvelous moments and magnifies the beauty, wonder and endurance of first love.
My Review
This book is in two parts. The first was slow paced. I had to force my way through it because all I could see was a very shallow female MC who was always ‘Why me-ing?’ It took me two weeks to get through it.
So let’s start with this: I went into reading this book forgetting the description I had read when I signed up for the book review. I couldn’t for the life of me remember wat it was supposed to be about. Then little things started popping out at me: the darkness, her first time with her boyfriend. I still couldn’t remember what the book was about, but I was getting an inclination of it.
In part two, we finally hit the meat of the situation. The MC is now an adult, one of her closest friends pretty much forces her into therapy with a new psychiatrist, and the story has meaning.
The MC is no longer this little girl who is way too over confident and doesn’t give a crap about anyone. She is a woman who cares about people, has taken on the role of loving and doting aunt to her friends children, and who realizes something significant happened in her childhood that shaped her into the person she is.
By the end of the book, each meaningless scene in part one has meaning, a definition. There was a method to the narcissism. And I bawled like a baby.
Although the book could use some more editing and character building in the first part, I fell in love with the book.
The storyline is poignant and heart wrenching. Each scene created a person, not just a character or a world, but an entire person moving through life in different ways. The charaters grabbed you in their innocence, their loyalty. Their ends.
Flawless is truly one of those books that grabs you and pulls you in. It will break you down and build you back up again, just as th characters are broken and reshaped.
This book carries a trigger warning for depression, rape, and suicide. But as a victim of depression and rape, a survivor, I can tell you that it meant omething to read this back and come out stronger. Do not let fear of something that happened before keep you from moving on.
I give 4 stars, all around.
You can find Flawless on Goodreads
You can buy Flawless here:
About the author:
Jennifer McGill-Sadera first worked in the publishing industry as a junior copywriter for NAL/Penguin. She has written and edited for newspapers and magazines as a free-lancer and on the staffs of major women's publications "Woman's World" and "Redbook." Her New Adult novel "Flawless" is her first published book, though she admits to writing three previous unpublished books "just for fun." A nature lover, she recently became a certified horticulturist and has a side business designing flower gardens. She and her husband live in upstate New York with their two kids, two dogs and a lop-eared rabbit, who, incidentally, has a starring role in "Flawless."
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