A Model Summer
Paulina Porikova
Hyperion
Reviewed by Sarra Borne
Shy, gawky, fifteen-year-old Jirina (Yee-ree-na) is invited
to come to Paris for the
summer by
the owner of a modeling agency. He sees
a special beauty in the girl that no one else has ever noticed. Jirina has always been too tall and too
skinny to consider herself attractive, and her schoolmates are of much
the same
opinion based on the insults they toss at her so easily.
Jirina meets her roommate Britta at the airport. Britta
is perfect, blonde, blue-eyed and
beautiful, everything that Jirina has always wished to be.
Jirina is positive that she can’t possibly
compete with Britta, a feeling that only gets stronger when her
“go-and-sees”
leave her confused and convinced that she is uglier than ever. So why does Jirina keep getting more
callbacks and photo-shoots while Britta gets fewer and fewer?
When she first arrives in Paris Jirina is very naïve, a real
ingenue. Through a series of humorous
faux pas Jirina eventually becomes more sophisticated as she learns
from her
mistakes. She quickly realizes that
modeling is a cutthroat business where it’s every woman for her self
and models
cheerfully sabotage each other to get a cover.
Jirina finds out that modelling isn’t nearly as much fun as
she imagined it would be, the hours are long, she often feels like a
piece of
meat and the model-chasers can be downright scary, but she also
discovers that
there is nothing else like it in the world.
Jirina befriends several interesting characters including
Emanuel, a flamboyant makeup artist who she is at first shocked to
discover is
homosexual; Hugo, a gentleman who rescues Britta from certain disaster;
Evalinda, a successful model also from Sweden;
and Rob, a much-older Australian photographer who steals her heart.
The author is former
model Paulina Porizkova who is also the author of children’s book The Adventures of Ralphie the Roach.
She insists that A Model Summer is not an
autobiography it’s simply a coming-of-age
story featuring a young model. In a
1989 interview, Paulina said that she never really liked modeling.
''People are
shocked when I say I love the money and hate the job, but it isn't very
creative to stand in front of a camera all day.''
Paulina Porizkova clearly
expresses her creativity in her debut novel.
It is a fascinating subject that she describes vividly and quite
expertly. A Model Summer is
a book that only a fashion industry insider could
write. The book ends without spelling
out Jirina’s ultimate fate leaving to the imagination whether Jirina
ends up
soaring with the eagles or if her life comes crashing down like a
poorly built
house of cards. A fitting tribute to the real world of beauty where not
everyone ends up "living happily ever after" as they do in fairy
tales.