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Allie Rowbottom

Autor von JELL-O Girls: A Family History

2+ Werke 235 Mitglieder 12 Rezensionen

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Bildnachweis: Willy Busfield

Werke von Allie Rowbottom

JELL-O Girls: A Family History (2018) 168 Exemplare
Aesthetica (2022) 67 Exemplare

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My new guilty pleasure genre is internet/social media-themed novels. This novel is similar to Followers in that the main character is an influencer. After high school, Anna moves to Los Angeles, determined to be an influencer and willing to do whatever it takes. It's all about followers, likes, and her Instagram grid. She finds a manager/boyfriend who gets her numbers--and also pays for a variety of cosmetic procedures. We see this wild world of likes and stories, grids and parties, sponsorships and looking the part--run largely by men, consisting largely of young women with no skills or talents to build their follower count with.

In the current timeline of this novel, Anna is 35. No longer an Influencer, she works at Sephora (the black and white store). Her repeater fillers, botox injections, and various other cosmetic procedures have left their mark. Has she learned her lesson? Not really--she is now ready to undergo the Aesthetica procedure, which claims to reverse all previous cosmetic procedures to make you appear to have aged naturally. It is dangerous, it is not approved, and she is feeling desperate.
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Dreesie | 1 weitere Rezension | Dec 30, 2023 |
I felt obligated to read this after Allie showed up on two of the podcasts I listen to (Gastropod's episode on gelatin/jelly, and the Sporkful posting a guest episode from Household Name). While the history of the Jell-O company is sprinkled throughout, like the subtitle says this is primarily biography- first, of Allie's grandmother Midge, and then mostly about her mother, Mary.

Family history, feminism, and Jell-O's marketing strategies throughout the years are deftly woven into a quick pageturner. Looking at other GR ratings, opinions seem pretty mixed, and I wonder if that's due to expectations. This isn't a microhistory of Jell-O, nor does it focus on the inventor's family (the man who sold it to the Woodwards, who Allie is related to by marriage). However, it's an alright piece for the mother-daughter genre.… (mehr)
 
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Daumari | 9 weitere Rezensionen | Dec 28, 2023 |
I'm not sure if I love or hate this book yet. Although the plot is very different, the vibes remind me of Luster by Raven Leilani, with a bit of My Dark Vanessa. This is one I need to read other folks' reviews of.
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ACLopez6 | 1 weitere Rezension | Feb 25, 2023 |
I’ve been in a bit of a book-finishing rut for the past month and a half. All year I’d been flying through books and then, as soon as my grandmother got sick and passed away, I haven’t wanted to touch a book. Until now. Part of getting back to my normal life it seems must include reading (which is very logical given my occupation, I just hadn’t felt like opening a book), and these days, reading means primarily nonfiction. It’s been a year of my near complete lack of interest in fiction and YA (my two staples for the past two decades), so when book club finally veered back to nonfiction, I was thrilled – I hadn’t actually finished a new book club book since, uh, January 2017.

If I were to write a memoir, it would be a lot like Jell-O Girls. The publisher summary doesn’t exactly capture the spirit of the memoir – it sensationalizes it more than needed. Allie Rowbottom faces an interesting inheritance – money from Jell-O which supported her artist mother her entire life, and a “curse” so to speak, which is basically her family trying to find a source of blame for poor genes. I was intrigued when I picked it up, and it held me captivated until I finished it – in 48 hours. And then I went to log it in Goodreads and see what other people thought about it. Oh boy.

I need to start holding off on looking a Goodreads reviews until I’ve finished a book. I adored Jell-O Girls and thought it one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. It seems, however, I am in the minority when it comes to most readers and I think that there are two primary reasons for this. Firstly, the integration of the Jell-O story with that of Allie’s family doesn’t always work particularly well. It’s nice, and a refreshing interlude at times, to see how Jell-O has changed over the years, but it really has very little to do with Allie, her mother Mary, and her grandmother, Midge, our three female protagonists of the memoir. Second, if you’ve never experienced any of the traumatic events and family situations the main characters experienced, it can be easy to discount them as Rich White People Problems, as most people in my book club, and on the interwebs of Goodreads, seemed to do.

Those two things considered, as someone who has been the primary caretaker to a family member slowly dying of cancer, just lost her grandmother, has had to handle the fact that her mother will most likely die of cancer given that she’s already a three-time survivor, whose parents are divorced, whose family has a long history of mental illness, when you’ve struggled with anorexia nervosa and developed OCD tendencies, passed out and not remembered the last time you ate because you couldn’t control anything in your life except what you ate, well. You could say Allie’s Jell-O Girls is the story of me and my mother’s family.

We’re all a little crazy, humanity proves this. And when you’ve experienced very similar situations to Allie and you want to convey just how magnificently she captures the feeling of waiting for hours on end in the surgical waiting room that you struggled for years to find words to describe, you want to share that with people. You want to talk about just how important this book is to you, not just because you think it’s good, but because it let you know that you are far from alone. That other people have experienced the same set of traumas, self-inflicted and otherwise, that you have. That it’s okay to feel like you’re losing your mind and that you are not alone.

Despite working in a bookstore and talking about books for a living and recommending countless books to people over the last few years, I don’t actually have the chance to sit down and talk about books in detail with many people. I get to give people my thirty-second elevator pitch on a book and hope they’ll buy it. And part of the success of the store I work at is that all of the employees have their own genres of interest – Su reads things dark and twisty, Pam reads contemporary women’s and historical fiction, Mary reads commercial nonfiction and fiction, Jennifer is our children’s buyer and can tell you anything and everything about all the picture books on the shelves, Kaz specializes in LGBT literature, PK reads business and history, Hadley reads the little known random books published by small, academic and indie presses, Staci reads just like my mom, thrillers and mysteries from Baldacci to Scottoline, and I read a little bit of everything in between. There’s not a whole lot of overlap. Therefore, enter book club – the perfect opportunity to discuss books with (mostly) like-minded individuals.

In my 29 years of existence and of the 220 books I’ve read since I started working at the bookstore in 2015, it is one of the best books I’ve ever read. I don’t care if the rest of the world disagrees with me. I will praise it for handling life situations that so many people find difficult to talk about. So please, ignore the plethora of poor ratings on websites. Ratings don’t capture the spirit of the book. If you think reading this book would benefit you, your family, please. Take a look at it.
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smorton11 | 9 weitere Rezensionen | Oct 29, 2022 |

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Werke
2
Auch von
1
Mitglieder
235
Beliebtheit
#96,241
Bewertung
½ 3.3
Rezensionen
12
ISBNs
18

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