Rachel Reviews: No More Ugly Girls by Thomas Cannon

Auburn Halverson is a young woman who, it must be admitted, is not in an easy place, if indeed she has ever found herself in one. She is a mother of two young girls, `Emma and Jackie and clearly loves them. However, she also feels restricted with the life that having two young children gives her. Her boyfriend, Steve goes out to work whilst she remains at home and having left the district where she grew up to be with Steve, she now finds herself isolated and bored.

This allows her time to sit with her thoughts and her paranoias and over-analyse everything even though she desperately tries not to. But inevitably, this mulling over and over does not help her and she continually allows herself to be plagued by the memory of past indiscretions and behaviours. She veers between believing herself to be a product of her past and desperately trying to break out of the assumptions that she feels others make of her due to her lack of education and her unmarried mother status. (It is perhaps moot to say at this point that Emma and Jackie have different fathers.) But is there a further underlying reason for her low self-esteem and her continuing pattern of choosing the "wrong" men?

What Cannon has done in this book is create a character study of a confused young woman who has perhaps not had the best start in life and lacked parental encouragement and who, in a desperate drive to seek approval, ends up becoming a party girl, a drinker, knowing that her attractiveness will win men over. However, what she is increasingly finding is that the type of men her behaviour attracts are not the best. They are also, despite her best efforts at giving them what she thinks they want, difficult to keep.

I felt sympathy for Auburn and hopeful that her rising strength would win out. The ending brings you to a point of resolution to a degree, although to my mind, the book finishes abruptly and I was left with questions, most specifically about Auburn's relationship with Chad, her friend and stalwart advocate throughout the book. I suppose that Auburn's struggle didn't end here and that was what the author was trying to represent.

However, family dynamics and the confusion of someone battling to find their own worthiness are the book's strength and clearly depicted.

Rachel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

This review was first published on Reedsy Discovery where I was privileged to read it as an ARC: