Outside Beauty (review)

"I loved my sisters more than I loved anyone, maybe even more than I loved my mother." So says Shelby, twelve in the summer of 1983 and second of the four girls her gorgeous mother had with four different men; as the girls and their mother crazily careen about the country running from or to fervent admirers of their mother, they absorb her instructions about what they need to know (how to be beautiful and appeal to a man) and tighten their sisterly bond. This traveling feminine circus comes to a sudden stop, though, when the girls' mother suffers a serious car accident that leaves her hospitalized, and the four sisters are split up and sent to live with their respective fathers. This experience forces Shelby to get to know the dad she's barely met as she agonizes over the fate of her favorite little sister, and the separation eventually sends the sisterhood into drastic action. This is a story of considerable originality, and what could be an overwrought problem novel ends up instead being a combination of poker-faced comedy and understated character and family study. The book gives the girls' mother her full magnetic due and sympathizes with the decline of her powers even as her emphasis on man-trapping is subtly questioned; she's also tacitly given credit for having produced a stellar crop of kids and for having found several pretty decent guys for their fathers. The various configurations of girls and dads are by turns comedic and touching, with Shelby's geeky dad quietly heroic in his dawning awareness of the importance of the sisterly bond to his daughter. Readers who like their family stories with some freshness and their sisterhoods literal will want to join this fascinating clan.