Wildly Crafty

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.

Reviewed for Hyperion Books also submitted to Front Street Reviews