Everyone is beautiful

Review by Booklist Review

Everything in Lainie Coates' life is changing. Her husband receives a scholarship to a prestigious music school, so the family moves from her native Houston to Cambridge, Massachusetts. While Peter is involved with his studies, Lainie feels lost and alienated caring for her three young sons until she meets Amanda, an acquaintance from high school, at a local park. Lainie is at her frumpiest in sweatpants, still carrying the weight from her baby when a stranger asks when her baby is due. Mortified, she lies. How does one explain her error to gorgeous Amanda with her perfect daughter? This embarrassing incident starts Lainie on the path to her own self-discovery, that is, if she can find the time and the outlet. Center takes a woman at her most vulnerable time and sets her on a journey to find herself without losing what she holds most dear in a superbly written novel filled with unique and resonant characters.--Engelmann, Patty Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

When Lanie Coates moves from Houston to Cambridge, Mass., with her musician husband, Peter, she loses her support system and quickly becomes overwhelmed by her three small boys and a self-image that's sagging both literally and figuratively. In this agreeable mom-lit entry from the author of The Bright Side of Disaster, Lanie, a former painter, finds beauty in everyone but herself, and especially adores Peter, even though the two of them seem to be drifting apart. The early chapters nearly sink beneath the weight of routine housekeeping details and scenes describing the children's bodily functions and fascination with their body parts, matters most parents have experienced, but which don't necessarily make for great fiction. However, as Lanie begins to find herself through a newfound passion for photography, the story gains traction, and the tension grows as her photography teacher turns out to be a smitten kitten. Like real-life marriage with children, this book offers enough sparkling moments to compensate for the tedium. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Center's second novel after The Bright Side of Disaster is a keeper. Lanie has just moved her family from Texas to Cambridge, MA, so that her husband, Peter, can realize his dream of becoming a professional musician. But while Peter is enthusiastic about his new challenges, Lanie mourns the loss of her old house in Houston and struggles not to go insane with the lack of money and her three little boys running wild. Changes happen slowly for Lanie. After having three babies, she is carrying extra weight, but the high of alone time at her new gym is enthralling. Then her mother mails some old cameras to Lanie, who signs up for a photography course taught by the creepy but talented Nelson. As Lanie's weight goes down and her artistic skills go up, her life with Peter is shaken. Can her marriage handle her transformation? The challenges and hilarity of young family life, combined with Lanie's heart-wrenching search for herself, will have readers laughing and crying. For all popular fiction collections.-Beth Gibbs, Davidson, NC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

In Center's lighthearted latest (The Bright Side of Disaster, 2007), a young mother yearns for self-realization while wrangling three boisterous preschoolers and a distracted husband. Lanie Coates' introduction to Cambridge, Mass., where her composer husband Peter has begun graduate studies, is a local park, where she hopes to find other mothers to befriend. The Coateses, including three boys, Alexander, Toby and Baby Sam, all under the age of five, moved from Lanie's close-knit Houston neighborhood, leaving her supportive parents behind. At the park, the mothers recoil in shock when Toby bites another child. All, that is, but one woman, who asks Lanie when she's due. But Lanie isn't pregnantshe hopes. Just as she's about to demure, Amanda, Lanie's cheerleader high-school classmate, appears out of nowhere and offers to organize a shower. Determined to drop postpartum pounds, Lanie signs up with a local gym. Every weeknight, after the kids are in bed, Lanie works out on the treadmill, ignoring glances from a middle-aged fellow exerciser with Ted Koppel hair. Peter, busy with his piano, mostly leaves Lanie to single-handedly supervise the boys. Hoping to revive her artistic career, former painter Lanie takes up photography and finds that she's a natural despite having to fend off her instructor, the very same Ted Koppel look-alike. When Peter, on the eve of a career-making trip, catches "Ted" kissing Lanie, a communication impasse ensues, not helped by Lanie's tendency to mislay cell phones. Amanda, mother of preternaturally docile Gracin, tries to mentor Lanie's makeover, but tempers her beauty and sex tips with disillusion. (Amanda's wealthy but homely husband has decamped, bursting her Martha Stewart bubble.) In less deft hands, the horrors of the out-of-control Coates toddlers would resemble bad reality television, but Center's breezy style invites the reader to commiserate, laughing all the way, with Lanie's plight. Avoids the obvious clichs, while harkening pleasantly back to '50s-era motherhood humor classics like Jean Kerr's Please Don't Eat the Daisies. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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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. I hadn't showered because the whole family had slept in one motel room the night before, and it was all we could do to get back on the road without someone dropping the remote in the toilet or pooping on the floor. We had just driven across the country to start Peter's new job. Houston, Texas, to Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'd had the kids in our tenyear- old Subaru the whole drive, two car seats and a booster across the back. Alexander kept taking Toby's string cheese, and the baby, except when he was sleeping, was fussing. Peter drove the U-Haul on the theory that if it broke, he 'd know how to fix it. On the road, I was sure I had the short end of the stick, especially during the dog hours of Tennessee. But now Peter was hauling all our belongings up three flights of narrow stairs, and I was at the park, on a blanket in the late-afternoon shade, breast-feeding Baby Sam. Peter had to be hurting. Even with our new landlord helping him, it was taking all day. And I was just waiting for him to call on the cell phone when he was ready for us to come home. Or as close to home as a curtainless apartment stacked high with boxes could be. We 'd been at the park since midmorning, and we were running low on snacks. Alexander and Toby were galloping at top speed, as they always did. I'm not even sure they realized they were in a new park. They acted like we might as well have been at home, in Houston, the only place they'd ever lived. They acted like the last five days of driving hadn't even registered. I, in contrast, was aching with loss. I didn't like this park. Too clean, too brand-new, too perfect. The parks at home had character--monkey bars fashioned like cowboys, gnarled crape myrtle trunks for climbing, discarded Big Wheels with no seats. And we'd known them backward and forward--every tree knot, every mud hole, every kid. This park, today, felt forced. It was trying too hard. I surveyed the moms. Not one of them, I decided, was a person I wanted to meet. And just as I was disliking them all and even starting to pity them for having no idea what they were missing, park-wise, Toby-- my middle boy, my sandy-haired, blue-eyed, two-year-old flirt--watched a younger kid make a move for the truck in his hand, and then, unbelievably, grabbed that kid's forearm and bit it. The little boy screamed as Toby pulled the truck to his chest. "My truck!" Toby shouted. (He always pronounced "truck" like "fuck," but that was, perhaps, another issue.) And then, of course, all hell broke loose. I jumped up, startling the baby out of a nap and off my boob. I ran across the park, wailing baby on my shoulder, shirt unbuttoned, shouting, "Toby! No!" Toby saw my horrified face and instantly started to cry himself--though he was no match for the little kid he 'd bitten, who was now screaming like he was on fire. His mother, too, had sprinted from her perch, dropping her purse on the way, and was now holding him as if he'd been shot. "Is it bleeding?" she kept asking the boy. "Is it bleeding?" It was clearly not bleeding. Isn't that the number one rule of parenting? Don't Make Things Worse? All the other parents, meanwhile, had gathered around us to see what the heck was going on. My shirt was hanging open, the baby was still shrieking, and I remembered from one of those parenting books I used to read--back when I used to do that type of thing--that when a child bites, the parent of the biter must give attention to the bitee. I turned toward the Excerpted from Everyone Is Beautiful: A Novel by Katherine Center All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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