Beautiful You

This is a silly book. I understand it is meant to be a satire on sex, the role of women in society and consumerism, but really, there is only so far Palahniuk can push the envelope.

The thing is that this book is pretty well written (I finished it after all), but the plot became so ridiculous and far-fetched that I found myself rolling my eyes on every second page.

A brief synopsis: Penny Harrigan is an everywoman. No supermodel good looks, no high flying career, she is simply average (and I like that). She is astounded when the world's richest man (Maxwell) begins to court her, and their relationship quickly turns to one of mind-blowing sex and pleasure. Maxwell is in the sex toys business, a brand called Beautiful You, and tests all his prototypes on Penny. But there is something sinister about his motives, and when the products eventually hit the market, it has devastating consequences for the world as we know it.

This is my first Chuck Palahniuk novel, and even though I did not exactly enjoy Beautiful You, I still want to read his other works (Fight Club and Invisible Monsters.) He is a gifted writer and, for the most part, I enjoyed the first half of the novel. It begins as a Fifty Shades of Grey parody and is quite funny. But then it quickly spirals into absurdity and nonsense and becomes increasingly degrading to women.

If a fifteen-year-old, sexed crazed, sci-fi loving boy wrote a novel – this would be that novel.

A dystopian novel set in the near future where a lunatic Musk type seeks to control women and their purchasing behaviour through a huge range of super-addictive sex toys. Yes, it sounds mental and mostly is.

It romps along in typical Palahniuk style, and there's a twist at the end as usual. Read it in a few days.

I liked it, although it could have been better as it got stuck a lot of the time in explaining the sex very scientifically and when it wasn't scientific in description, it dropped into mad mysticism.