Review - Everyone is Beautiful by Katherine Center

Everyone is Beautiful

by: Katherine Center

Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books (February 17, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1400066433
ISBN-13: 978-1400066438
Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1 inches

As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If only people would take the time to really look at each person they meet, they would indeed discover that everyone truly is beautiful. That being said, I simply love the title of Ms. Center's newest creation Everyone is Beautiful. It is a perfect title and gives a wonderful message - especially in today's society where the desire to be thin, gorgeous and movie star beautiful is sadly the norm.

Everyone is Beautiful centers around a young married mom of 3 active little boys. Lani and her family are moving to an entirely new city across the country. Dealing with this is difficult enough for Lani and when a mom at the local park asks Lani when her baby is due (Lani is far from pregnant) she decides to take a whole new outlook and perspective on her life.

With that, Lani joins a gym, takes up photography classes and tries to get a bit of her "old self" back. Mind you, she doesn't do this for others, but for herself.

I truly found myself reflected in many aspects of Lani. The character is delightful and wonderful - an everyday sort of person that many women will find themselves relating to. There were many times throughout the book where I just had to stop and say - wow, that is just how I have felt.

Katherine Center taps into a reality of losing oneself and turns it into a delightful and fun story. Once I started reading, I found myself racing through the pages, living right alongside Lani, as she battles the everyday issues of parenthood. The stress that children put on a marriage, goes without saying, but so is the fact that you wouldn't change the presence of those children for the world. After becoming a Mom, nothing is the same again, however with a bit of "tweaking" a wonderful balance can be found - not only enabling a mother to be the best she can be for her children, but a wonderful wife and, most importantly, to be your own person with your own piece of self.

I found myself laughing, relating and cheering for the main character of Lani, as well as her newest close friend and old classmate, Amanda and Lani's husband Peter. Though Everyone is Beautiful focuses on a mother, parenthood and the strain on the romance of marriage, I truly feel that this is a book that anyone would enjoy - single, married, with children, without children. I recall reading somewhere where Ms. Center refered to her book as "mom lit". I love that term and think it a great fit! Also, Everyone is Beautiful would make a great book for a few girlfriends to pick up, read and discuss together. With Spring and Summer near at hand, I would definitely recommend picking up a copy of the awesome book. I look forward to reading the author's other work, The Bright Side of Disaster!!

*overall rating 4.5/5

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About Everyone is Beautiful:

Lanie Coates’ life is spinning out of control. She’s piled everything she owns into a U-Haul and driven with her husband, Peter, and their three little boys from their cozy Texas home to a multiflight walkup in the Northeast. She’s left behind family, friends, and a comfortable life–all so her husband can realize his dream of becoming a professional musician. But somewhere in the eye of her personal hurricane, it hits Lanie that she once had dreams too. If only she could remember what they were.

These days, Lanie always seems to rank herself dead last–and when another mom accidentally criticizes her appearance, it’s the final straw. Fifteen years, three babies, and more pounds than she’s willing to count since the day she said “I do,” Lanie longs desperately to feel like her old self again. It’s time to rise up, fish her moxie out of the diaper pail, and find the woman she was before motherhood capsized her entire existence.

Lanie sets change in motion–joining a gym, signing up for photography classes, and finding a new best friend. But she also creates waves that come to threaten her whole life. In the end, Lanie must figure out once and for all how to find herself without losing everything else in the process.

Katherine Center’s Everyone Is Beautiful is a hugely entertaining, poignant, and charming new novel about what happens after happily ever after: how a woman learns to fall in love with her husband–and her entire life–all over again.

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Excerpt:

The day I decided to change my life, I was wearing sweatpants and an old oxford of Peter’s with a coffee stain down the front. I hadn’t showered because the whole family had slept in one motel room the night before, and it was all we could do to get back on the road without someone dropping the remote in the toilet or pooping on the floor.

We had just driven across the country to start Peter’s new job. Houston, Texas, to Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’d had the kids in our tenyear-old Subaru the whole drive, two car seats and a booster across the back. Alexander kept taking Toby’s string cheese, and the baby, except when he was sleeping, was fussing. Peter drove the U-Haul on the theory that if it broke, he ’d know how to fix it.

On the road, I was sure I had the short end of the stick, especially during the dog hours of Tennessee. But now Peter was hauling all our belongings up three flights of narrow stairs, and I was at the park, on a blanket in the late-afternoon shade, breast-feeding Baby Sam. Peter had to be hurting. Even with our new landlord helping him, it was taking all day. And I was just waiting for him to call on the cell phone when he was ready for us to come home. Or as close to home as a curtainless apartment stacked high with boxes could be.

We ’d been at the park since midmorning, and we were running low on snacks. Alexander and Toby were galloping at top speed, as they always did. I’m not even sure they realized they were in a new park. They acted like we might as well have been at home, in Houston, the only place they’d ever lived. They acted like the last five days of driving hadn’t even registered. I, in contrast, was aching with loss.

I didn’t like this park. Too clean, too brand-new, too perfect. The parks at home had character—monkey bars fashioned like cowboys, gnarled crape myrtle trunks for climbing, discarded Big Wheels with no seats. And we’d known them backward and forward—every tree knot, every mud hole, every kid.

This park, today, felt forced. It was trying too hard.

I surveyed the moms. Not one of them, I decided, was a person I wanted to meet. And just as I was disliking them all and even starting to pity them for having no idea what they were missing, park-wise, Toby— my middle boy, my sandy-haired, blue-eyed, two-year-old flirt—watched a younger kid make a move for the truck in his hand, and then, unbelievably, grabbed that kid’s forearm and bit it.

The little boy screamed as Toby pulled the truck to his chest. “My truck!” Toby shouted. (He always pronounced “truck” like “fuck,” but that was, perhaps, another issue.)

And then, of course, all hell broke loose.

(click here) to continue reading chapter 1

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About Katherine Center:

Katherine Pannill Center started writing fiction when she was in sixth grade, when she and her two best friends filled countless spirals with stories about meeting Duran Duran at the mall and bewitching the band members into falling in love with them. These stories involved kissing, weeping, limos, the occasional log cabin, and many gentle blankets of snow.

Around that time, Katherine also started keeping journals, logging with great sincerity every detail of middle school life as she knew it. Lists of friends! Lists of boys! Lists of must-have shoes! Lists of personal flaws and areas for improvement! The journals (though not the lists) continued through college, and now Katherine has storage boxes of them taking up far too much room in her attic.

Katherine always intended to be a writer. At St. John’s School, in Houston, where she clocked her K-12 years, she generated stacks of poems, school newspaper columns, and short stories. At Vassar College, she majored in English, wrote short stories, lettered her poems onto metal signs that she put up around campus, and wrote a novella (which won the Vassar College Fiction Prize).

Not too far out of college, she met the guy she would get to marry a few years later. On that first night, he held the car door open for her, made her laugh so hard her face hurt, and--he says--knew by the end of the evening that she was the one. On their second date, Katherine almost choked to death on a pancake.

Around that same time, Katherine won a fellowship to the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, where she taught Freshman English and earned an MA in Fiction. She also co-edited fiction for the literary magazine Gulf Coast.

After graduate school, Katherine held a number of crazy jobs and a few sensible ones. Her favorite job was teaching creative writing to little kids through a program called Writers In The Schools. She also liked working in her uncle’s “Used, Rare & Out-of-Print” bookstore, an old house with many reading nooks and a secret door, which has now been sold and turned into an Italian restaurant.

Katherine grew up in Houston, the middle of three very close sisters. Her older sister, who has beautiful red hair, worked as a journalist for many years and now teaches French. Her younger sister, who has beautiful green eyes, is a lawyer with a serious knack for decorating. When they were younger, their house was a cacophony of stereos blaring from each room, blow-dryers, and phones ringing. Back then, they sometimes got so mad at each other they threw shoes. Now, they are all great friends.

Katherine’s parents are both Texans with charming accents. Her dad is a lawyer and her mom—among many other things—crossbreeds Brahman cattle with Herfords at her ranch.

Katherine’s husband Gordon is a sixth grade teacher at the school she herself went to, and he likes to joke that they met in his class. They have two feisty and impossibly sweet young children—a girl and a boy—who love to give hugs, turn on the hose, raise and lower the driver’s seat in the car, run the bath faucet, squirt hand sanitizer, eat lollipops, sweep rain puddles, dump out raisin boxes, stand on the dining table, unfold folded things, listen to stories, and give people presents (like sticks, pieces of cardboard and grocery receipts from their mama’s purse).

If you ask Katherine’s 4-year-old daughter what Katherine does for a living, she will tell you that her mama “is an author. Just like Richard Scarry.”

Katherine's official BIO:

Katherine Center’s first novel, The Bright Side of Disaster, has been featured inPeople Magazine, USA Today, Vanity Fair, the Houston Chronicle, and theDallas Morning News, among others. BookPage named Katherine one of seven new writers to watch, and the paperback of Bright Side was a Breakout Title on special display at Target last spring. Katherine recently published an essay inReal Simple Family and has another essay forthcoming in the anthology Because I Love Her: 34 Top Women Writers on the Mother-Daughter Bond. Katherine’s second novel, Everyone Is Beautiful, will come out both in hardcover and as an audiobook in February of 2009. She has just turned in her third novel, Get Lucky, and is starting on a fourth. She lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and two young children.

(click here) to go to Katherine's website filled with delightful pictures and information!

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Win Prizes:

EVERYONE IS BEAUTIFUL VIRTUAL BLOG TOUR '09 will officially begin on March 2 and end on March 27. You can visit Katherine's blog stops at www.virtualbooktours.wordpress.com in March to find out more about this talented author!

As a special promotion for all our authors, Pump Up Your Book Promotion is giving away a FREE virtual book tour to a published author or a $50 Amazon gift certificate to those not published who comments on our authors' blog stops. More prizes will be announced as they become available.