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Paper Magazine – April 19, 2007 -- Beauty and the
Book -- Model-Turned-Novelist, Paulina Porizkova Strikes a
Literary Pose -- By Carlo McCormick. -- There are a lot of cultural
cliches attached to models, and for as long as Czech-born former
supermodel Paulina Porizkova has been defying stereotypes, nothing
could constitute a more radical intervention against the tyranny of
stupidity now epitomized by the likes of America's Top Model than
her remarkable literary debut, A Model Summer (Hyperion). Beyond the
obvious contradiction to expectations, how evidently smart, eloquent
and sensitive her prose is, her novel's charming invocation of that
breath-taking moment of youth in which identity and destiny are
forged over a Parisian summer, offers an emotional depth and
complexity we seem collectively incapable of reading in our most
mediated objects of desire. More a memory than a memoir, Paulina
understands our inherent desire to take a milieu so close to...
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The New York Times April 8, 2007 -- In Her Fashion
by Alex Kuczynski -- A MODEL SUMMER By Paulina Porizkova. 324
pp. Hyperion. $23.95. -- With the publication of ''A Model Summer,''
Paulina Porizkova makes her own contribution to a literary
sub-sub-genre, books by supermodels. Most of these get bad reviews,
either because they're truly awful, like Naomi Campbell's ''Swan,''
which won Seventeen magazine's Super-Cheesy Award, or -- call me a
conspiracy theorist -- because jealous book critics aren't tall and
gorgeous, so they try to wield their puny amount of power to
establish some sort of moral order. Of all the supermodels of the
Supermodel Era -- Linda, Naomi, Christy, Claudia -- I always found
Porizkova the most likable and provocative. Now in her early 40s,
she still seems the one most likely to produce a book worth
reading...
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Kirkus Review – February 15, 2007 -- A Model
Summer, Porizkove, Paulina, Hyperion, 336pg $24.95 ISBN
1-4013-0326-9 -- This fiction debut from iconic early supermodel
Porizkova is the story of a wide-eyed teenager who gets a good look
at the underbelly of the fashion world when she spends a summer
modeling in 1980s Paris. A gangly teen living in Sweden, 15-year-old
Jirina Radovanovicova is surprised when she is singled out by a
fashion scout to work as a model in Paris. A child of Czech
immigrants, with unusual dark looks, "frog eyes" and a gap-toothed
smile, Jirina is teased by boys at school and barely tolerated by
her unhappy single mom. With little more than some secondhand
clothes and a paperback copy of Kafka's The Castle given to her by
her often-absent father, Jirina jets off to Paris, where she is
assigned a room with Britta, another girl from Sweden. The room is
in the apartment of their modeling-agency owner, Jeanne-Pierre, his
disaffected former model wife, Marina, and...
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