For Princess Tatiana Anatolia, better known as Ana, nothing matters more to her than gaining the approval and love of her mother, a woman whose dominant characteristic is her overwhelming vanity. When Ana realizes that she might very well surpass her mother in beauty, and as a result, lose her mother’s love, she engages upon a self-destructive path of overeating, physical neglect, and self-abuse, ruining her own looks. Thus, she reasons, she’s safe, and perhaps she can win her mother’s favor once more, no matter what the toll is on her body. However, Ana’s not safe from the whispered advice of her mother’s favorite advisor, a strange little man known as the Beauty Consultant, and soon Ana, along with fifty of the kingdom’s most attractive girls, are sent away to the Academy for Girls. But at the Academy, a secret is brewing, and being beautiful is a curse. Only Ana has the mental strength to realize what’s going on and stop it before it’s too late, but she too is being seduced, by the freedom to be herself and be pretty once again. But to save her friends, she may have to sacrifice it all once more.
A none-too-subtle allegory about the price of beauty in today’s society, the drive for acceptance from family and peers, and the lengths some people will go to in order to maintain their youthful looks, Beauty is a fairly quick-paced story with a likeable, intelligent, resourceful protagonist. Unfortunately, it does feel rushed near the end, the climax arriving and concluding with some haste. Furthermore, the thread involving the Beauty Consultant character is never really fleshed out, leaving him as something of an enigma that bears explaining. Beauty is a good book, well-told and enjoyable, but over far too quickly and with a few minor flaws. I hope we’ll see more YA books from this author, though, as she shows a great deal of promise.