Perfect You (review)

Life has changed for Kate: her father recently quit a steady job to sell vitamins from a booth in the mall, and her best friend, Anna, returned from camp with a new svelte shape, glossy appearance, and preference for the popular girls over her old friend. Not changed is Kate's classmate and fellow mall-worker Will, a noted player with whom Kate has an adversarial relationship that's only partly playful. As her family and best-friend situation become increasingly strained, Kate inexplicably finds herself engaging in random makeout sessions with Will, but she refuses to believe that they could be embarking on an actual relationship. Bloom overplays Kate's misjudgments, requiring soap-opera-level contrivance for her to remain convinced that Will's not just using her even as she's an obvious sap for Anna's periodic apologies and claims of friendship, with the result that Kate is simultaneously gullible and excessively suspicious. It's therefore Kate's complicated family saga that's the most successful of the three plots, and the book depicts the increasing tensions with poignancy and keen perception; it's clear that Kate's mother loved her husband for his contrast to her parents, but that contrast is now spiraling the family into a financial black hole as Kate's father expects both financial and labor support from kids and wife for following his chimerical dreams. Since most stories of parental reassessment are divorce-centered, this is an original approach to the subject; those willing to wade through the formulaic romance and friend story to get to a thoughtful family drama may find this a tense but satisfying read.