Okay, there is a lot of valuable information in this book to help novice designers make nicer-looking work, but… am I the only person who thinks this is the most hideous cover design ever? It’s like a bad mexican resaurant menu, only worse. The font, the colors and the ghetto clip arts all make me want to gauge my eyeballs out. And the back… oh god… it’s got bevel/emboss… NOOOOOOO!!! All the design on the interior of the book is fine, I don’t know how the cover went so horribly awry. Someone recommended I read this (which, to be honest, I’m kind of pissed about since the implication seemed to be that I’m an incompetent designer. So I centered some text… Sue me! It looked like ass when I left or right justified it!) But, seriously, how can a book telling people the priciples of design have such a heinous cover? Exercise #1 in the book should have been “Redesign the cover of this book to make it actually look like a credible reference.”

Every so often I read a book where I start off thinking it’s clever and fabulous, but by the end I hate it and thank god it’s over. This is one such book.

Hadley Freeman’s style, at first glance, is delightfully witty and clever, but the book’s total lack of structure and overarching point (it’s basically 234 pages of short, snarky essays on fashion topics), made the aforementioned wit feel tedious and repetitive by page 80. At this point the author’s opinions also started to feel wildly schizophrenic, with the author decrying the denizens of the fashion industry as shallow, elitist, coke-snorting megalomaniacs with one breath and then defending them as artists and feminist heroes in the next. We see this same sort of flip-floppery in the way the author expresses her fashion opinions: If she dislikes something, she lambasts it as the worst kind of torturous, sexist stupidity which could only be embraced by people without brains, self-esteem or taste…but if she favors something it becomes an expression of choice and self-expression, which, if anyone criticizes it, makes them a sexist monster or a snotty killjoy. The author seemed to have an ongoing internal battle between wanting to be a pious, above-it-all feminist and a bitchy fashion writer. Apparently she opted for both.

The thing I started finding the most grating as the book DRAGGED ON, was the outrageous hyperbole the author employed to make the things she disliked seemed blatantly stupid and illogical (Apparently high heels make you walk like a knock-kneed hunchback and kitten heels make your calves “swell up like waterlogged balloons” who knew?) Her section on stiletto heels was actually so over-the-top in it’s frothing vitriol that one would be inclined to presume that perhaps a stiletto heel killed her parents.

Less than halfway through the book, I pretty much got what I presume the author’s point was (what I like=good, what I don’t like=evil, and aren’t I clever for saying so?) and started thinking the only way I could possibly drag through the rest of the book were if made it into some sort of drinking game where I took a shot every time I saw the word “sartorial.”

And so I think over this book and wonder if, had it been 80 pages long (maybe padded out with some illustrations or large print?) would it have seemed like the breezy, witty little book it was trying to be and not have become so tedious that when I reached the end I threw it to side saying “sweet Jesus! Thank god I’m done with THAT!”

Maybe.

This book was breezily and digestibly written, but was at times excruciating to read. Our narrator is a pathological narcissist who seems to need constant validation and makes overly dramatic mountains out of the molehills of her bourgeois angst. Throughout the books, she tries to play off her grating flakiness as lovable quirk and paints very two-dimensional pictures of the “friends” she makes on her journey, who seem to only exist to validate and encourage our self-absorbed heroine.

I couldn’t help but think the whole time I was reading this book that a month of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy would have done infinitely more good for the author than her year of navel-gazing in exotic locales, but then, that doesn’t get you a fat book advance and a spot on Oprah.