Book Review: Modelland by Tyra Banks

I picked this book up on a whim because I had seen people joking about it online. I got it off oceanofpdf because its out of print and no library in the state of Indiana has it I'm pretty sure.

This book was bad. The writing, the place names, it was just terrible. And I enjoyed every minute of it. This book is bad but it came from the heart. As much as Canne del Abra and Didgeridoo and Chakra as place names (what I assume to be the Middle East, Australia, and India respectively) pissed me off, it was fun. This was a YA novel, and it reads like one.
To me, this is the same caliber of entertainment as reality TV. It sucks but you can't look away, and it's fun to make fun of.

Plot wise, its a school and the MC isn't supposed to be there (or so she thinks) and so she struggles a lot. She's a misfit and not that pretty. She has a group of misfit friends. There's a couple mean girls, theres some good teachers and some bad ones. We got the evil mom and golden sibling archetype. There's the pretty boy who inexplicably is in love with the MC. It is all very cookie-cutter in the characters. The setting being a terrifying modeling school is fun, the strange aspects of it all were actually interesting to me. It was very whimsical in a vogue way.

I did not like the ending. The MC, Tookie De La Crème and her friends are separated like 5 chapters away from the end and we just. Never see them again. We see the bully who Tookie makes peace with finally, and her love interest, but not her friends.

There WAS a proposed sequel, but 15 years later we do not have one. Tyra Banks even mentioned it in her acknowledgements.

Overall though, this book was never boring. It was surreal and weird and wacky and kind of treated itself like some profound thing which it was not. And I enjoyed it. It is almost 600 pages long and it is weird every step of the way.

Also, the acknowledgements. They're just so bizarre. I mean, its Tyra Banks though, so what do you expect. At one point she mentioned a town in Morocco where she read an excerpt to children who didn't speak english????