Everyone is Beautiful by Katherine Center

Release date: 2009 / 233 pages

Synopsis (from jacket cover): Lanie Coates’s 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.

First line: “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.”

Review:  I LOOOOOOVED this book!  How’s that for an opening!? I have enjoyed so many of the novels I’ve read lately, that I was worried my praise would have become mundane, easily dismissed white noise by now. 

But this is how much I loved this novel…  Last time we were at the cabin, I spent 30 futile minutes trying to get connected to my online classroom using my brand-new, quite pricey Verizon remote WiFi.  Then I spent 20 minutes driving to the gas station that has free WiFi, 3 hours grading papers online and putting out online “fires” in the discussion forums, 30 minutes running (doing my “road work” for a 5K my sister and I are running in November — my first), 2 hours finishing People of the Book, and 2 hours reading and reviewing Once Upon a Vine.  My hubby had not yet returned from golf yet, so I picked up Everyone is Beautiful and simply devoured it.  I did not have nearly enough time or energy to even satisfactorily begin a new novel properly, but somehow nearly finished it before dinner!

So, why do I love this novel?  First, the ease of the prose — it was as if I wasn’t even reading.  I almost felt as if I were watching a little movie — or actually became Lanie in an out-of-body-experience. 

Second, the humor is just right.  While I have nothing in common with Lanie (beyond age), her experiences raising three sons under the age of four, re-discovering who she is beyond a mother and a wife, and reviving her neglected marriage were so entertaining I couldn’t help but empathize.  I’m sure many books have been written about what happens to a woman — and to a marriage — once kiddos come along, but this subject was so fresh and insightful in the hands of this author.  Needless to say, I immediately requested her first novel from the library — and can’t wait to experience it.

To give you a taste of Center’s prose, I’m going to quote from the last paragraph of the novel, even though (despite the title) ”beauty” really is only a secondary theme in this lovely novel:

“And here, after all that, is what I have come to believe about beauty: Laughter is beautiful. Kindness is beautiful. Cellulite is beautiful. Softness and plumpness and roundness are beautiful.  It’s more important to be interesting, to be vivid, and to be adventurous, than to sit pretty for pictures. A woman’s soft tummy is a miracle of nature. Beauty comes from tenderness. Beauty comes from variety, from specificity, from the fact that no person in the world looks exactly like anyone else… I believe that when you love someone, she becomes beautiful to you.  I believe the eyes see everything from the heart — and nothing in the world feels as good as resting them on someone you love.”

I wish I had multiple copies to give away, but alas only one…  So, leave me a comment if you are interested — and request this from the library at the same time.  Pure delight, I promise…

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