Reality Bites Back!

This book began promisingly with Cassie’s problems amusingly explored, a pleasing page layout and engaging chapter titles. Plaisted seeks to set the traumas of the real world against a glamorous backdrop of international modelling, dance school and theatre.

It is in establishing this contrast that the book begins to lose its initial impact. Cassie’s attempts to get a boyfriend, amusingly bolstered by any number of well-intentioned magazine articles, begin to look less convincing when her glamorous international model sister whisks in from Paris proffering designer gifts and hair and make-up advice. The tone of the narrative lacks depth or anything contentious, although there are passages throughout where the original impetus is recreated. A more consistent stab at realism would have lifted many of the characters into three-dimensional existence.