Beauty by Louise Mensch
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Blurb: There isn’t a woman on earth who doesn’t have her beauty secrets. But for Dina Kane, beauty is more than just business. It’s power. And it is the secret. She’s dragged herself up from poverty to Park Avenue. She’s rolled with the punches. And she’s learned how to win. Now someone is out to destroy her, and all she’s built. They’ve underestimated Dina Kane. She’s staying at the top – and she’s happy to wait for the perfect moment to exact her revenge… (Headline Review, 2014)
Lesley Thomas, The Times
“Mensch is right to promote ambition as a non-dirty word for young women — but does her leading lady have to be so unsympathetic? She doesn’t have a single female friend until the last pages. Ambition doesn’t have to involve blackmailing your mother or sleeping with an old man to get your own back on his son.”
Alice Jones, The Independent
“It has a potboiler momentum, in parts unfolding like an outlandish episode of Gossip Girl. Elsewhere, there is a very long subplot about a moisturiser, which for all of its tautening, brightening properties is still a moisturiser. Beauty is not highbrow, but that is not the problem. Mensch lavishes so much care on Dina’s exterior there is nothing left for her inner life which reads like a Cosmopolitan advertorial.”
David Sexton, London’s Evening Standard
“It is Mensch’s own fantasy, we can be sure, for in her blog Unfashionista, she has volunteered as much: “I like strong men, alpha males.” Again: “Look, guys, I’m as enlightened as the next chick but there really is a need for dominant males in the world. For your alphas, your muscular, ambitious, driven, ass-kicking commandos …” So there we are, guys, way to go. Brutality, cruelty, arrogance, strength. It’s not much of a political programme, perhaps? But then again, maybe it is and we are well spared it.”
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