Series: Standalone
Release Date: April 30th, 2013
When eighteen-year-old Becky Randle’s mother dies, she’s summoned from her Missouri trailer park to meet Tom Kelly, the world’s top designer. He makes her an impossible offer: He’ll create three dresses to transform Becky from a nothing special girl into the most beautiful woman who ever lived.
Becky thinks Tom is a lunatic, or that he’s producing a hidden camera show called World’s Most Gullible Poor People. But she accepts, and she’s remade as Rebecca. When Becky looks in the mirror, she sees herself – an awkward mess of split ends and cankles. But when anyone else looks at Becky, they see pure five-alarm hotness.
Soon Rebecca is on the cover of Vogue, the new Hollywood darling, and dating celebrities. Then Becky meets Prince Gregory, heir to the British throne, and everything starts to crumble. Because Rebecca aside, Becky loves him. But to love her back, Gregory would have to look past the blinding Rebecca to see the real girl inside. And Becky knows there’s not enough magic in the world.
A screamingly defiant, hugely naughty, and impossibly fun free fall past the cat walks, the red carpets, and even the halls of Buckingham Palace, Gorgeous does the impossible: It makes you see yourself clearly for the first time.
• No abuse
• No OW/OM
• Does have the Heroine pushing away
• Does have a separation between the Hero and Heroine
• See Ending for HEA status.
• See Possible Triggers for Abuse and OTT sad parts.
Rating: 4.5/5 stars
Gorgeous was incredibly slow to start and very confusing. It had large paragraphs that were solely descriptions of every.single.thing in the room, including people. It made for a massive jumble of words in my head, however once Gorgeous hit its rhythm (basically once Rebecca’s Part started), it began to make sense and be the awesome book I thought it was.
Have you ever just wanted to read those books that would take you on an adventure of what living in the celebrity/famous person’s life, without the story being a clichéd drama? Well, I have. And Gorgeous was terrific in its presentation of that life because it was real and had drama, but the drama didn’t eat up the pages or hog the reader’s attention. The story wasn’t really about the drama but about Becky’s life and how beauty affects it.
This leads to the central theme of the book: what’s the price of beauty and does being beautiful mean a fulfilling life. It was exciting reading about Becky’s life as Rebecca because it really showed how different she was treated by people who knew her before and by strangers. But to herself, whenever she looked in the mirror, she was Becky. And even when she was filming that movie with her teenage movie star crush, she still had the insecurities of Plain Jane Becky, despite being gorgeous. It shows that traditional beauty doesn’t mean self-confidence.
The romance between Prince Gregory and Becky was super cute, and that scene where she saved his life? OMG! Talk about kick-ass! At some points, I thought that their relationship was a bit rushed. Especially since being in Becky’s head, you understood that although to the prince she was this gorgeous and mystical and fabulously accomplished woman, she, herself, was Becky, not Rebecca, which created a weak link in their relationship. This was because Becky basically had a whole life before Prince Gregory came into it, and it’s not the one he thought.
The last bit of Gorgeous, the third part, was the most interesting in the sense that it was really a learning curve on beauty and how two-dimensional everyone is. It’s a lesson that although you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, people usually do.
In the end, Gorgeous was a HEA. But, the road to get there was filled with bumps and twists and turns. And, there is also a major plot twist, btw. And it’s for all these reasons that I adored this book!
