The Surprising Life of Charlie Glass (size 18 and a bit)

by Angela Woolfe

[Leah]

When I first heard about The Surprising Life of Charlie Glass, I was really excited to read the novel, even more so when I read that Angela Woolfe is in fact Holly McQueen, author of the Isabel Bookbinder series. I really like Holly’s writing style and I was so thrilled she was back with a new book. There are many Chick Lit novels that deal with heroines who are fat, but who, mostly, aren’t fat at all but just like to complain that they’re fat, even though size 10/12 isn’t fat at all. So I was really chuffed to read a novel about someone who genuinely was fat. Yes, Charlie does lose a lot of weight but she was fat, she’s a fat girl turned thin who has all the issues that comes with being a fat girl turned thin.

The Surprising Life of Charlie Glass is a modern-day take on Cinderella. Charlie Glass is Cinderella, and has spent the past ten years looking after her ill father, until his eventual death. When her father’s will is read, along with her two step-sisters (beautiful on the outside, ugly on the inside) Gaby and Robyn and step-mother (wicked, wicked, wicked), it comes as a surprise to all when Charlie is left majority shares in Elroy Glass, the shoe company her father founded. She decides that rather than selling her shares in the company, she will instead be a part of the company, and after taking a long, hard look at herself, she decides the best way to do that is to take the bull by the horns and make herself just as beautiful as the rest of her so-called family. She returns from her bootcamp slim and beautiful, and she begins to formulate a plan for her fathers’ empire. But being skinny isn’t easy, and Charlie’s about to learn a lot about herself.

I really, really liked Charlie Glass. I had some issues with the novel, that I will get to, but first I want to talk about what I liked. I liked the characters, I really did, from Charlie herself (though she was far from perfect), to her best friend Lucy, to her crush Ferdi, even Oliver, her Dad’s lawyer were all really great characters. Yes, there were characters I didn’t like, mostly Diana, Gaby and Robyn, who were really awful characters. I thought the book was really well-written as Angela Woolfe has a really great, easy writing style, and there were parts where I laughed out loud. It takes a special writer to do that, lemme tell you. I really liked the whole Cinderlla-plot, and even more so I liked the fact Charlie was willing to take on her father’s business and follow-through with a plan she had for the company.

But, like I said, there were issues. Firstly, Charlie had absolutely no backbone whatsoever. There were times where she was so hilarious about things – “For Christ’s sake, there’s barely room for my essential organs in here,” when finding herself wenched into a too-small Valentino dress – but mostly she let her sisters and step-mother walk all over her. Which is how she found herself in the too-small Valentino dress anyway. The biggest problem I had though, was the fact Charlie happily started dating Jay Broderick, even though she’d went for an interview for cook at his family home and he pretty much admitted she was a heifer. The worst part is Charlie even references the fact, “I wouldn’t be here with him now if I still looked like that” referring to when she was still fat. And that summed it up in a nutshell. Jay would have never, ever gone out with Charlie when she was fat but she still went out with him anyway! Say what? It drove me nuts. Utterly nuts. It also drove me a little mad just how Robyn-like Charlie became with all the beauty things she started doing. She got obsessed about how she looked. Way more than is allowable, really. I could have accepted it if it wasn’t in my face all the time.

For all the issues I had, I did really like the novel. It was disappointing to find issues with it, and if Charlie had just discovered a little bit of a backbone then it would have been a brilliant book because it would have then had everything. But I do recommend the novel, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I was able to put the issues I had aside to continue reading the book, because it was very well written. I could see Charlie’s weight struggles, I could understand them because I’m a bit of a fat girl myself, who would desperately love to lose some weight. I loved Charlie’s best friends Lucy and Ferdi, and I loved that the novel made me laugh and I look forward to Angela Woolfe’s next novel. It’s so good to have her back on the Chick Lit scene and although not perfect, it was a pretty damn good effort and one I really, really enjoyed.