A Beginner's Guide to Salad
Ruth is a twenty something, who hates exercise and eating healthily- she would rather curl up on the sofa with a giant bar of chocolate and take away to watch her favourite TV show with her best mate Billy. As we all would.
When she gets an invitation to her school reunion, she is determined to be slim to get back at her high school crush who broke her heart and her self-worth.
She embarks on dieting journey with the help of her housemates and friends to ready herself for the comeback of her life. What could go wrong?
Ruth is like every woman I know, including me- she flits about from diet to diet, taking as much artistic licence as she can before realising that diets don’t really work like that.
This tale is proof of how things said when you were young still have a resonance in your later years. I loved this story because it’s so true to life, so many women hold onto comments said by people from their past who were not worth their time or their energy then, never mind now. Such negativity can prevent people from moving on and can damage their future relationships and Ruth is an example of such a woman.
Ruth may only be character; however she speaks for so many ladies out there who hold onto these untruths and choose to ignore compliments, due to their lack of self-esteem and an unachievable vision of themselves created by bad people.
The story is not a long one- I devoured it in three sittings and missed sleep, so you can easily read this in no time at all and believe me, you will, because you can’t put it down. The dialogue is slick, the characters are believable and the ending is so delicious, it is movie worthy. I laughed out loud and tried not to wake up my husband as I read it into the early hours- it was so funny because it was like Joyce was telling my life story. The feelings are genuine, the humour is relatable and the smell of cabbage soup will be forever wafting up your nostrils!
It sticks two fingers up to school bullies and curvy girl haters and that is why every woman who has ever dieted must read it!