It’s been over a year. It’s time for me to throw in the towel on this one.
Before I write this review, I would like to address the idea that a person cannot review something without finishing it. In some cases, that might be true. Let’s face it, a great mystery doesn’t really show its colors until the end.
But in this case, I would have to disagree.
To make an analogy, let’s say I went to a restaurant where I was promised the most incredible half-steak of all time. This would be the ultimate in delicious food. However, the other half of that steak was made of molded shit. In order to get to the delicious steak, I had to eat through the shit steak.
Now, perhaps the delicious side would be, in fact, the most delicious steak I’d ever eaten. But more than likely, the act of consuming 4 oz of shit before tucking into the good steak would negate any positive effects of the most delicious steak of all time.
When the chef actually takes the time to build a half-steak from shit, the likelihood that things will improve is very, very low, and I have my doubts when it comes to a single individual having the rangy-ness to both cook the best steak ever AND decree that molding shit steaks is an acceptable activity. So one could argue that I’m doing the restaurant a disservice by giving it a complete negative review without eating all the way through the shit steak until it starts to get good. But I would argue that forcing someone to eat a shit steak is not only indicative of what I should expect as the meal progresses, but also that there is no steak good enough that I would ever visit that restaurant a second time if it meant eating the shit steak again. If the shit steak is part of that restaurant’s experience, fair enough, but they’ll get the review they deserve.
As a writer, one must be conscious of the same thing. If you write 600 pages of gold, but preface it with 200 of shit, nobody is ever going to make it to the gold, and it’s essentially useless.
Which is what I would call this book. Useless.
To be precise, I read 202 of the 563 pages in this book. So less than half, but still a decent page count on its own. Certainly enough to where I should have been able to tell what the hell the goal of this goddamn insane book could potentially be. I’ve never gone this far into a book and still been so confused. I read As I Lay Dying all the way through in high school without realizing that each chapter was narrated by a different character. So from my view, characters were suddenly talking in weird tenses and styles that made almost no sense. It was like being on acid except not fun and there was no music and actually eating crayons remained the closest I’d come to “tasting colors.” That experience was still far less disorienting than Modelland.
Reading this book, things were just thrown in with no preface or explanation. Reading it was like talking to a 3rd grader who says, “Sally said she couldn’t go, but then Jeffrey said yes I could.” I don’t know who the fuck Sally is, I have no goddamn idea who Jeffrey is, and I just want to stop talking to you and thank christ someone invented firecrackers so I could stick them in my ears and blow my hearing completely the fuck away.
Modelland is like that except with worse names. A few:
Tookie de la Creme: this is our heroine. A fun fact is that “de la creme” translates to “quick, say something that sounds French-y.”
Theophilus Lovelaces: the love interest. I know, it sounds like a type of criminal that pulls his dick out and then does something unfathomable with it.
Zarpressa Zarionneaux: the enemy. Not of Flash Gordon, but of Tookie de la Creme. A disturbing sign of how insane these names are is that typing the name “Flash Gordon” seemed very normal in comparison.
And this naming fever doesn’t just infect the characters. Tookie writes in a notebook, something that most of us might call a notebook, diary, or perhaps a journal if you are a man who wants to call it a journal because men don’t write pining love letters and confessions about their tenderest feelings in a diary. They write those things in a journal LIKE A MAN.
Just to maintain the naming insanity in Modelland, Tookie’s diary/notebook/journal is called “T-Mail Jail.” For no reason, born of a deranged mind, T-Mail Jail. Which I would make fun of, but I just remembered that I call my wallet P-Funk-Mallstar instead of “wallet.”
Seriously, everything in this book has to have an offbeat name. T-DOD. Thigh-High Bootcamp. Tick-Tock-Color-Clock. 7Seven. Ci~L. Yes, that’s a TILDE. If I may, take a moment to pronounce a tilde for me, if you will. In fact, go ahead and pronounce these symbols as well (keeping in mind the difference between saying “comma” and indicating the sound it makes as a standalone object):
#
)
<
]
How’d that fucking work out for you?
In doing research, I did discover that in Estonian the tilde has a vowel sound. So either Tyra Banks was using that version of the tilde and she knows a lot more than I give her credit for, or she’s a complete dolt who thinks that a tilde is a dash with some smize added in for fun.
It IS impossible to talk about this book without talking Tyra. I don’t want people to think that I’m talking shit about this book just because I think Tyra Banks is a supermodel and should know her place. Not at all. I’m sure there are many supermodels out there who have been successful in many endeavors. Besides, I am a definite ten in the looks department according to a study I did once when I was crying drunk in the mirror and wondering where my life had gone wrong and was really trying to boost my self-esteem with some positive banter, and I hope to really hit the big time as a writer someday. I’m really sick of people hating me and Tyra just because we’re fucking gorgeous.
In the beauty department, there is a strong vibe to this book that Tookie de la Creme is the teenage Tyra, and we get some definite insight into her own issues with her body. I guess maybe there’s room in the world for people to have their own feelings about their looks, that their hair sucks or they have a high forehead. But trying to win sympathy when you describe your main character as the female ideal if her forehead was a little shorter and her hair was less wild, that’s a tough row. This is supposed to be a book for a teen audience. When I was a teen, I had muttonchops made out of acne. Nobody would even have sex with me if I had a bag on my head because the grease on my face would have seeped through as though you’d filled the bag with fried chicken instead of my stupid head. I was 5’5″. I still can’t grow a beard, yet as a teen my entire ass was thatched with hair. Thick hair that feces was passing through. Yeah. I’ll spare everyone the genitals talk portion of my all male revue here, but suffice to say I was not winning any awards in that department. I don’t know that anyone was in high school, but I never took biology so whatever happened in there remains a shrouded mystery to me.
But go ahead, tell me more about your problems that seemed to have no effect on you moving to Paris to model when you were 17. Really dazzle me with a description of how your eyes are a different color as ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS BEAUTY-BASED PEOPLE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.
I think I have some idea of what Tyra was going for here. Which is a bold statement because there’s such an unbelievable amount of complete garbage contained in these pages that it’s a wonder anyone even considers sifting through it.
I think what she was going for was a tale of what it’s like to be a model. Everything is bizarre, the world is sort of upside-down. People have weird names we don’t understand. I think she may have been trying to do what so many sci-fi authors do, to disarm us by removing us from the world we know so that we can think about the big issues we face as humans outside of our normal context. I recently read the Forever War by Joe Haldeman, which does an awesome job of explaining what it’s like to be a Vietnam vet by exploring the issue in a way that is unfamiliar in the details, yet all-too-familiar in the tone.
What Tyra has managed, though, is complete failure. What she has done is tantamount to trying to portray the terribleness of working in a factory and coming out the other end with Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. She’s so goddamn concerned with cute acronyms and insanity that any message she may have even vaguely conceived is completely lost. Not to mention that the story itself makes no sense whatsoever
I mean…I just don’t know. I don’t know what else to say about this book. I don’t know how to condense the experience. You’re reading along, and all of a sudden there’s a scene where a group of girls are being whisked away to Modelland in what I can only describe as a giant gossamer ballsack, which then fills with a suspiciously semen-like substance before bursting.
You’re finding out the backstory of how Tookie’s father, an acrobat, lost his eye by taking a bow and bowing his eye directly into an upturned sword for no reason whatsoever.
You discover that Tookie’s mother goes by “Creamy,” which means that her name is Creamy de la Creme.
The book is a loss. It’s not fun, it’s not something that provides any sort of takeaway. It’s not even so bad that it’s fun, so committed to itself and its badness that some of that passion seeps through and turns reading it into an enjoyable experience. It’s just a pile of shit formed into the shape of a half-steak.
I do, however, want to suggest that if any police or mental health or any other sort of organizations are trolling Goodreads, for the love of god, keep an eye on the people who gave this three or more stars. I’m not calling them criminals, but I really think they have a fundamental problem within their biology. This is not a matter of taste. This is a matter of mental health.