Imagine Blair Waldorf from Gossip Girl
writing a memoir—it would approximate Diamond's voice. Diamond, a blonde who began a modeling career in New York City at age 14, comes off as catty and haughty as she tells what she bills as a harrowing story of her modeling rise, fall and subsequent comeback—“like a phoenix from the ashes.” Given the popularity of shows like America's Next Top Model
, her memoir is likely to have a built-in audience, but her writing can be crass (for example, she repeatedly mocks people's foreign accents) and her endless sarcasm grows annoying. The author presumes that such things as putting her tongue in a drink and then feeling “smug with the knowledge” that the woman who drains it has her “cooties” is funny. Readers primed to expect tragedy may find the “career-altering event” that “nearly ruins” Diamond almost laughable: unscrupulous stylists dye her long hair and give her a terrible cut, too. Ages 14–up. (May)
