Girls to Total Goddesses by Sue Limb

Girls to Total Goddesses by Sue Limb
Buy Girls to Total Goddesses by Sue Limb at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Teens
Reviewer: Zoe Morris
Summary: Harmless if slightly generic teen fiction, this is the latest readable though not too memorable tale of Zoe and Chloe's exploits.
Buy? Maybe	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 320	Date: July 2009
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN: 978-0747582748
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Best friends. Big sisters. Beauty disasters. Beautiful boys called Beast. Welcome to Zoe's world. Strap yourself in – it's gonna be a bumpy ride, with some scraped knees and bruised egos along the way.

In the latest instalment of their adventures, Zoe and Chloe are back and on fine form. Their mission? To turn themselves into total goddesses in 7 days. Or maybe 8, if real life gets in the way. They will tone their figures, tame their hair, and trim distractions (i.e. boys) from their lives. They will transform themselves into serene creatures and sail away to a higher spiritual plane, leaving the riff raff behind them. At least that's the plan, but in fiction, as in real life, things hardly ever go to plan, and that's where the fun starts. Whether locking each other up and accidentally losing the keys, or failing to realise that a brisk jog pre-school sans-deodorant is perhaps not the bestest idea ever, the girls trip from one misadventure to another, in a very un-godly way. And we've not even mentioned yet how hard it is to keep boy-shaped secrets from your best friend, even if it's only to spare her feelings.

I'd not come across Zoe and Chloe before, and with this book I rather felt like I was missing the plot at times. There were a few in jokes, some comments to previous escapades and so on, that I didn't quite get the hang of. It's not a bad book on its own, but it definitely read like part of a series, without a distinct beginning or end to this particular instalment.

Zoe and Chloe are teens, but I think this is one more aimed at girls (and make no mistake, it's definitely for girls and girls alone) from the first year of secondary school onwards. It's quite a fluffy, harmless story in terms of language and themes, but because the story is quite superficial and doesn't really go anywhere, I think it lacks the depth and plot development older readers would be looking for.

The book is an easy read, and reminded me of your typical soap opera, as every chapter had an almost cliff-hanger ending, starting a problem or incident or scene of some kind that immediately gets picked up on the next page. I didn't put it down long enough to think about it, and I imagine that's the point – you want to keep reading to see how the problem unfolds, and when it does and the next one appears, the whole cycle starts again. I found the book an interesting mixture of well written in terms of language, but less so in terms of the plot, the characters and the other ingredients that make up a great read. It flows in a nice way, but is rather unfocussed and says very little by the end.

I didn't think this book was outstandingly original, but it was funny, and captured well the daily embarrassments and dating disasters that I remember acutely from my own early teen years. I think girls of the right age would identify easily with Zoe and/or Chloe, perhaps seeing them as slightly older, cooler friends, because they come across as your average nice, friendly, typical girl next door.

Definitely worth a look if there's nothing else on offer, this is certainly a readable if not exactly memorable book.

Thanks go to the publishers for supplying this title.

Zoe and Chloe go out to lunch in an earlier title, while younger readers might prefer the Ruby Rogers titles, also from Limb.

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You can read more book reviews or buy Girls to Total Goddesses by Sue Limb at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy Girls to Total Goddesses by Sue Limb at Amazon.com.

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