Book Review: Will Work for Prom Dress by Aimee Ferris

At First Sight: Even though it isn't exactly her dream, budding artist Quigley has agreed to her best friend Anne's plan to get themselves some smoking-hot dresses for their Senior Formal, even if that means some crappy after school jobs (like working at a pizza factory or a dinner-theater thing).

That's how she gets dragged to Anne's mom design class to work as a model for Mrs. Parisi's class of budding designers. Quigley things it's all going to be a drag - and a bit humiliating to boot since she doesn't have the thin, waif body Anne does and no-one will chose her as a model - until she meets Zander.

He might not be able to draw, but his designs are beautiful, and he always picks Quigley as his model. He is nice and funny and charming, and sometimes it even seems like he's really interested in her.

But things aren't all smooth sailing for Quigley, between the signals Zander sends and she misreads  Anne escalating rebellious behavior and David, Quigley's nemesis who suddenly seems interested in way more than their not-so-friendly artistic competition. 

Second Glance: Will Work for From Dress had been on my TBR pile for a good long while, yet I always kept putting it off. I always figured it would be a fluffy, fun, little book to read, and I think that was it's intention but I don't think the execution was all the way there.

To start with, I thought the characters were nice but really underdeveloped, I never felt like I really got to know them in any sustancial way, it was all on the surface. And Anne was really annoying during 80% of the book (she always got Quigley stuck with the worst part of the jobs she lined for them, and gets them in really awkward situations).

There are times where your only information about certain characters comes in the form of third-party exposition that borderlines info dump. And the problems the girls face are more or less rather superficial. Anne acts out and does stupid stuff to lash out at her mom, Quigley assumes things and miss interprets stuff, oh and she doesn't know what her artistic style is yet and this is A Big Deal that only gets trotted out at convenient times.  And so on and so forth.

And, in the end, everything gets resolved in a very perfect, sweet and instantaneous fashion. All the troubles, big and small, get magically solved in the last twenty pages or so (maybe even less), and it's just weird.

Bottom Line: Sadly, Will Work for Prom Dress was something of a disappointment. It wasn't particularly bad, just inconsequential, almost like a place holder for every other story about girls trying to go to prom. It doesn't suck bad enough to be singled out, and it's not special enough to stand out. It's just, by it's very definition: Meh. 

1/2