Book Review: Candy Girl
This is book twenty-four in 52 books in 52 weeks.
I was picking up a book for Britnie and this one happened to be sitting next to it. Juno was one of my favorite movies last year, so seeing her name under the title was enough to get me interested. This was written a few years ago, long before Juno. And I’m pretty sure it takes place years before Juno because I don’t imagine she spends much time in cold Minnesota anymore.
The subtitle says it all, “A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper”. I’ve enjoyed her bi-weekly columns on various subjects in Entertainment Weekly, and expected she’d be putting a humorous spin on the life of a stripper.
What a depressing book. First of all, by the end she hasn’t made some great discovery about herself. She hasn’t come to any profound conclusions about being a stripper. Basically she decides she did it because she was bored. Period. She already had a steady job, one she didn’t like, but it was a job. She went into a strip club on a whim for an amateur contest, and liked how scared and excited she felt that first time. From there it’s a combination of enjoying the extra cash, and not really having anywhere else to go that keeps her in the sex industry for a year.
The descriptions of the various clubs make them sound like cesspools, the customers all sound like disinterested scumbags, and her fellow strippers are long past the point of caring about much of anything.
I suppose her comments on not having the perfect body many strippers have, or wearing the clothes most strippers wear were interesting. Almost as if she was trying to make a statement about how she could succeed on her own terms. But by the end she’s wearing wigs and dressing just like the others, sometimes putting her wacky spin on things (the same type of wacky spin she put on the first ten minutes of June, the ugh wacky).
The book is full of the pop-culture references that were funny in Juno, you can definitely see her developing the skill of applying those references to her situation. There are funny moments, and occasionally there are funny lists like “the Best Songs to Strip to” that made me chuckle. It kind of rambles along, sometimes going many pages without telling you how she feels about what’s going on.
Grade C+
Read my other book reviews in the 52 week project here
Other people participating
- Jamie reviews Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett
- Heliologue reviews His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph Ellis
- Kevin reviews His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
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