She Walks in Beauty
By Siri Mitchell
Reviewed by Martha Artyomenko
The Gilded age of New York City. A game is played among the top young women of the city, to see who can catch the most eligible men to set them up for the rest of their life. It is the game of life. The prize is a lifetime of wealth and privilege . You mess up or lose, you are ignored for the rest of your life. You will not get invited to the tea’s, soiree’s, ball’s or banquet’s…..so beware of everything. The fact that your waist is not as small as your neighbor’s, your parents were not what you thought or other things this small, can effect the rules of the game.
Clara Carter is this season’s social star. She has played by the rules and aimed for the highest. But what if the highest is not the person she wants to spend her life with? What if she does not want to risk her health for beauty? Mysteries fill her life, as she discovers how her mother died, a friendship is threatened in the name of achieving good society. What will be the most important to Clara in the end?
My review:
Oh, how I was shocked at the lengths women would go to for perceived beauty…Siri Mitchell goes into great detail to show you the history of corsets, and the mutilation of the female body for beauty as well as the consequences there of. Ms. Mitchell does not disappoint us as this book is filled with historical facts and info, and for me was the best book I have ever read by her. It made me think how all through history women have mutilated themselves in the name of beauty and what we think is beautiful. I look around even now, in this age of “freedom” and still see the excessive dying of hair, tattoos, piercings, exposure of skin, and see we have not not come very far in all of history. Throughout history, everyone is the same, trying to live a certain way to achieve a certain place in society and at what cost? -Martha
Thank you to Bethany House Publishers for providing this book for review.