Review: Pretty in Plaid

Title: Pretty in Plaid: A Memoir
Author: Jen Lancaster
Pages: 363
Rating: 5/5

In Pretty in Plaid, Jen Lancaster reveals how she developed the hubris that perpetually gets her into trouble. Using fashion icons of her youth to tell her hilarious and insightful stories, readers will meet the girl she used to be.

Think Jen Lancaster was always "like David Sedaris with pearls and a super-cute handbag?" (Jennifer Coburn) Think again. She was a badge-hungry Junior Girl Scout with a knack for extortion, an aspiring sorority girl who didn't know her Coach from her Louis Vuitton, and a budding executive who found herself bewildered by her first encounter with a fax machine. In this humorous and touching memoir, Jen Lancaster looks back on her life—and wardrobe—before bitter was the new black and shows us a young woman not so very different than the rest of us.

The author who showed us what it was like to wait in line at the unemployment office with a Prada bag, how living in the city can actually suck, and that losing weight can be fun with a trainer named Barbie and enough Ambien is ready to take you on a hilarious and heartwarming trip down memory lane in her shoes (and very pretty ones at that) (Cover Blurb).

I aboslutely adore Jen Lancaster and her writings. I've been waiting for this new memoir to come out forever and couldn't get to Borders fast enough to pick it up. I made myself stop from starting this until we were on the road for vacation and flew through it in less than 24 hours. Unlike Jen's other novels that tell about the present, Pretty in Plaid tells the story of Jen's life from childhood. We get to see what Jen was like when she was in Brownies, her 11 years of college, and before meeting her husband Fletch.

This book was just as snarky and humorous as her first three, and contained many of those laugh out loud, pee your pants moments (I'm glad no one was sitting near me as I finished this up on th beach this morning). I would highly recommend this to someone who just needed to get away for a few hours, and wanted to forget their lives and read about someone else's for awhile!