Review: Everyone is Beautiful by Katherine Center

First line: The day I decided to change my life, I was wearing sweatpants and an old oxford of Peter’s with a coffee stain down the front.

From the inside cover: Lanie Coates’s life is spinning out of control. She’s piled everything she owns into a U-Haul and driven with her husband, Peter, and their three little boys from their cozy Texas home to a multiflight walkup in the Northeast. She’s left behind family, friends, and a comfortable life – all so her husband can realize his dream of becoming a professional musician. But somewhere in the eye of her personal hurricane, it hits Lanie that she once had dreams too. If only she could remember what they were.

These days, Lanie always seems to rank herself dead last – and when another mom accidentally criticizes her appearance, it’s the final straw. Fifteen years, three babies, and more pounds than she’s willing to count since the day she said “I do,” Lanie longs desperately to feel like her old self again. It’s time to rise up, fish her moxie out of the diaper pail, and find the woman she was before motherhood capsized her entire existence.

Lanie sets change in motion – joining a gym, signing up for photography classes, and finding a new best friend. But she also creates waves that  come to threaten her whole life. In the end, Lanie must figure out once and for all how to find herself without losing everything else in the process.

Katherine Center’s Everyone Is Beautiful is a hugely entertaining, poignant, and charming new novel about what happens after happily ever after: how a woman learns to fall in love with her husband – and her entire life – all over again.

My thoughts: This is the first book I’ve read by Katherine Center and I absolutely loved it. The writing was witty and the characters were all believable. It was a light, quick read, yet left you with some ideas to think over. Do we lose our sense of self once we get married and have kids? Does perfection lead to being beautiful?  Once Lanie decided to take some time for herself, she set realistic goals – something that should be a lesson to us all. She decided to eat healthy, work out regularly, and still eat a piece of chocolate cake every week. Definitely do-able and my kind of plan! The story is a life-affirming one that will help you to re-focus on the things that are really important in life and remind  you that beauty exists in all of life’s imperfections.

(I borrowed this book from the library.)