Jealous Haters Book Club: Modelland prologue and chapter one, “T O OKE”

Every journey begins with a single step. Sometimes, that step is motivated by the Pilgrim Plague. But we’ll get to that.

I started writing these in May of 2023, so there may be references to things that happened before now and the knowledge of the time in between. I will do my best to prune as necessary.

As always, any typos in the quoted text are the result of my human foibles, unless otherwise stated. And Team Tyra, if you’re out there and you see this (because I’ve seen you heart my social posts), please know that I love this book deeply, and any criticisms I express in these recaps is from a place of love, and know that my love for Modelland far outweighs my sassery. As a wise woman once said, “When my mother yells like this it’s because she loves me!”

Okay. Let’s hop into a Scout’s weird and gooey magic pouch for a journey back to 2023.

Let’s take a look at the mystifying prologue of Tyra Banks’s Modelland.

You want to be there. You know you do. Don’t lie, dahling.

Look, I know Tyra Banks’s name is on the cover, but I’m hearing Mariah Carey’s voice narrating it.

The Land you thirst for has loomed at the top of the mountain in Metopia for as long as you can remember.

If you read that, rolled your eyes, and thought, “Metopia? That’s quite on the nose,” I suggest you fashion some kind of protective cup or lead shield to wear over your face for the rest of the book.

The mountain referenced is perpetually covered in color-change fog:

You begin your mornings staring at the fog, longing for the fateful evening when it will turn a golden yellow and then, finally, like a push-up brassiere, lift.

I do not know who the ghostwriter on this project is, but I know in my heart that he is a gay man. This is a line that could be written by Robert Horn. I can hear Suzanne Sugarbaker delivering this line. Designing Women was on in the background when this was being written.

When the fog does lift, a giant glowing eye appears in the sky over Metopia and shines golden light everywhere.

But dahling, it is no ordinary golden light. Once it tickles you, you are suddenly…transported. You hear the softest of sighs or faintest giggles in your ear, even if you are standing alone. The once-stale air around you becomes both sweet and tart, making your nose tingle and sending a charge of excitement through your brain. The finest silk, the softest velveteen, or the supplest suede will brush your skin, but whatever you thought was touching you is nowhere to be seen.

The golden light might transport people somewhere better, but that description just transported me into a cold sweat-inducing flashback to the Under the Mountain makeover sequences in A Court of Thorns and Roses. If you don’t immediately get that reference, congratulations, you never read A Court of Thorns and Roses. Thus you are living your best possible life. Alternately, you have read A Court of Thorns and Roses, but you were so scarred by the experience it now resides in your memory only as a clinically repressed trauma event.

In both cases, I envy you.

Basking in the light is such a naughty tease, like getting a single lick of the most delicious butter-pecan gelato you’ve ever tasted: it inflames your obsession, increasing your desire a hundredfold. You lust to go to this Land to become one of the only famous people in the world. You ache to be 7Seven.

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?!

I’m just saying. It’s a weird spelling choice.

But listen, Ms. Banks and Mr. Ghostwriter: this is a YA. That is a lot of desire, obsession, lust, teasing, and inflammation for this genre. Let alone on page two.

Only a select few girls get a chance to even go to the amazing mountain land, and the only time it can happen is on The Day of Discovery, which is a big damn deal for the entire world.

Making the delirium even more intense, the Land sends seven talismans called SMIZEs into the world. (What an arcane word! Who thought of such a thing?)

Tyra Banks. Tyra Banks thought of such a thing. And that happened, for sure, on a brainstorming phone call about how to incorporate her personal brand into the book about a cutthroat modeling competition that already has her name on the cover. For those unfamiliar with America’s Next Top Model, SMIZE is a term coined by Tyra to describe smiling with your eyes but not your mouth. It’s a skill that was drilled into contestants for the first three seasons. Possibly beyond. After the first three, I stopped watching.

The SMIZEs don’t guarantee that you’ll get into the Land, but they do increase your odds of being chosen by ninety-one percent. They get tossed into the water and float around the world to be found:

Naturally, the week before The Day of Discovery, bathing, showering, pool use, and even sewer diving increase, threatening a drought.

Is this an intended condemnation of the fashion industry’s carbon footprint, or is it just a hilarious accident? [ed. On re-read here, I do like the idea of a SMIZE revealing itself to the rarest possible beauty in a sewer. Everyone has a truly equal chance, I guess.]

There’s no explanation in the prologue about what a SMIZE is made out of, but if it can come out of a showerhead, I assume it’s some kind of gel. I will continue imagining SMIZEs as a viscous substance, oozing through the world’s water sources and contaminating everything in their paths until further description is given. [ed. I still imagine them this way. Because I think about this book all the time.]

It’s my right as a god damn American and nobody can stop me.

Now, there are rumors in Metopia that getting into the Land isn’t all that great:

Like the rumor that the school often takes inhumane and irreversible disciplinary action.

Is the Land a school, or a land? Whatever, we’re talking about a school now. I have a feeling that throughout this book, we’re gonna need to just sit back and let it wash over us.

Or that certain “disposable” civilian girls are brought to the Land to be tortured and then killed, used as human sacrifices for ungodly experiments and animalistic rituals.

Finally, the perfect description of the America’s Next Top Model makeover episodes. [ed. Sorry, Team Tyra. Sometimes, I gotta pick the low hanging fruit.]

People want to go to the Land so badly, there’s a mental disorder known as the Pilgrim Plague that causes people to try to go to the Land without being chosen:

It’s a sickness that comes with a quickness and afflicts the most determined…and desperate. And the trek through the dangerous Diabolical Divide always ends in dismembering death.

It’s giving alliteration. It’s serving consonance.

Am I doing that right? I’m the boring kind of queer and I’m not up on the lingo.

This is my year, you say to yourself. And so does every other girl. They’ll choose me for sure.

Every girl feels the same way…except one.

Oh ho, which one? Is it the main character? It’s the main character, isn’t it?

Tookie De La Créme.

Yes! Of course it’s our main character! Would this even be a 2011 YA if the heroine wasn’t like other girls?

Look, is this Barbara Kingsolver? Is this Toni Morrison? No. But is it so camp that I suddenly found myself wearing a scout uniform? Absolutely.

This book might not be bad. It might be so bad that it’s good, or so good that it’s bad. It might exist in that interesting space between parody and flop, where the satire is so accurate that it eliminates itself. But there’s one thing, ONE THING, that I am certain of:

there is no way I’m getting through this whole book without referencing the “We were rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!” meltdown.

I’ll try to keep those references to a minimum.*

*This is a lie. [ed. Just want to check in and confirm that yes, it’s still a lie.]

All right. Here we are at chapter one, still being narrated at. Honestly, it’s kind of refreshing to read a book with an omniscient third-person narrator. So many of the books we read are in first-person POV. I’m currently reading The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin, which has some really interesting POV choices in it and, while it’s going to sound like reading bad books has finally broken me… I think the two compare, to be perfectly honest.

I think Modelland has the potential to be not only the best book we’ve ever read in this book club but a brilliant work of fantasy in its own right that would have received far more recognition if the author had been taken seriously. [ed. It is, and I will die a thousand deaths on this hill.]

Watch, by chapter seven, I’m going to be like, “Turns out there a was a gas leak in my office.”

The omniscient narrator opens the chapter by asking if we’ve seen the girl who fits this description:

The girl whose face not even the meanest person you know would describe as yuck but who you’d never in a million—no, a trillion years describe as alluring either. The girl whose eyes are three centimeters too far apart and whose mouth is four centimeters too wide. Not that you’d break out a ruler, but when you look at her, it’s enough to make you say that something is definitely… off.

If you’re at all familiar with Tyra Banks as a personality, you’re aware that she often describes herself (one of the most beautiful women who has ever walked the earth) as having flaws and imperfections that other women would kill to have as their biggest physical “problems.” And while she has spent a lot of time talking about the unfairness of our attitudes toward beauty and strives to empower women and girls, she also often insists that she’s not naturally beautiful, once stating that it “takes a village” to make her presentable as a model.

And like, ma’am. With all due respect, you’re absolutely full of shit. [ed. I stand by this, Team Tyra. We all know she’s full-time gorgeous.]

Which is why the description of our main character is pretty ridiculous.

She’s the girl whose hair has multiple personality disorder and can’t decide if its supposed to be quasi-curly, silky-straight, frantic-frizzy, or wet-and-wavy—or maybe  a “Power to the People” ‘fro.

Not loving the use of “multiple personality disorder,” but the 2010s were a different time. Like, way different. In a bad way. The thing I’m most stuck on, though, is that the prologue gave us a description of this strange and totally different world that we’re inhabiting, but it somehow has the same political activism slogans as America’s civil rights movement.

On the other hand, I saw a TikTok a few days ago where someone described writing fantasy and science fiction novels set in other worlds as the author being a translator and needing to come up with equivalent concepts from these strange lands so the reader can understand. While I will never accept nonsense like characters in ACOTAR drinking champagne, I will make allowances for a book like this, where a narrator directly addresses us and tells us about this world and characters while being fully cognizant that we are outsiders.

The narrator goes on to describe this girl as having bad posture, big feet, skinny arms and legs, and:

The girl with the humongous, punch-bowl-sized head, with a forehead that goes on and on and on, making her look like the weight of her cranium will topple her over and break her into a thousand pieces.

Again, these are things fans have heard Banks criticize about her appearance. It makes me hope that she wrote these passages because imagine being the ghostwriter and showing her this unflattering description. How did that meeting go? “So, you wanted the main character to have looks inspired by you. This is what I came up with, you big-headed freak.”

She has one green eye and one brown one.

The ghostwriter is like, “When I wrote the thing about the punch-bowl-sized head and the forehead so big it could crush you to death, I wasn’t describing you, Tyra. Because see? You have hazel eyes, and this girl doesn’t.”

So, yeah, this is Tookie De La Créme, a girl who is pretty but not pretty, and nobody ever remembers her.

For as unusual-looking as she was, Tookie was a Forgetta-Girl, one of the most forgettable girls in the entire world.

I haven’t read very far ahead yet, because I’m pacing myself, and also I’m a slow reader. Still, I’m not entirely sure how or why Tookie qualifies as a forgettable person, especially when, after a section break, we’re introduced to her laying on the floor of her school’s hallway, spraying whipped cream from a can directly into her mouth.

Oh, and uh… whoever wrote the following passage?

A bit of cream accidentally dropped from her mouth and dripped from her chin to her neck. With each squirt, more and more of the cream fell to her snug-fitting hand-me-up blue blouse, which had once been her younger sister’s. Another squirt landed in her hair. She then licked her tiny baby fingers from thumb to pinky and prepared for the next squirt.

Why don’t you take a seat over there? [ed. I have since learned that a dude ghost wrote this with Banks. Sir. SIR.]

Tookie is so utterly forgettable, her teachers never catch her skipping class even when she’s just lying sprawled out on the floor in a paragraph that can’t be within five-hundred feet of an elementary school.

Even when students leave class and have to step around her in the hallways, none notice her.

The school she attends is called the Bangle, Bauble, and Bead Institute, or B3, because it’s in a factory that used to make embellishments for fashion. And there’s a problem with the duct system, which makes gross smells sometimes.

Everyone called the school B4, for Bile, Barf, Belches, and Butt Bombs.

Okay, but that’s five Bs, though. Makes me kinda worried about the curriculum at this school.

The Day of Discovery, which we learned about in the prologue, is coming up, but Tookie doesn’t care about it. Which we also learned in the prologue. But it’s super important for us to know that Tookie isn’t like the other girls, who are all talking about the SMIZEs.

Girls had been searching for the magical charms for days, fighting at water spigots, sloshing through sewers, splashing in the Peppertown pool, which everyone knew kids peed in.

What is a SMIZE made out of? It can come out of spigots, we heard in the prologue that they can come out of the shower, like, what is the substance, and how big are these things?

As more people passed, as more girls chattered about T-DOD, Tookie began to feel lonelier and lonelier. It was yet another day when no one, not a single person, looked down on the floor and cried, Oh! Check out that girl down there! All the students rushed past Tookie like water in a stream flowing around a rock.

The only person who notices Tookie is her sister, Myrracle, who is embarrassed by her. But the feeling is mutual:

Beyond her looks and fancy flights of footwork, what was most disturbing to Tookie about The Myrracle, as Tookie’s mother called her, was not that she was Tookie’s younger sister. The most disturbing fact was that The Myrracle was distinctly, indisputably, flat-out…dense. As dumb as a lobotomized turkey—and turkeys were said to raise their heads to the sky during rainstorms and drown themselves.

Imagine if your mom named you Tookie De La Créme and then named your little sister The Myrracle. Like, wow, okay, fuck you, too, mom.

But this is where the book really shows the 2010s of it all: Tookie, described as being pretty much normal looking but with interesting eyes and physical flaws measured in centimeters, is not like the fashion-obsessed girls around her or like her beautiful sister, who isn’t intelligent. This was pretty common for YA books and teen movies around this time: a beautiful girl who doesn’t know she’s beautiful and who is smart and therefore better.

Tookie keeps a diary written in the form of letters she won’t send, addressed to people she knows.

She called this book T-Mail Jail. Tookie found it ironic that the book’s initials, TMJ, also stood for an ailment that impaired a person’s ability to open her mouth. The front cover displayed Tookie’s first name, handwritten in beautiful calligraphy. The spine of T-Mail Jail read DON’T KEEP OUT! The back cover urged INVADE MY PRIVACY—PLEASE! If one were inclined to follow these instructions, the inside cover challenged, I DARE YOU TO TURN THE PAGE.

WE GOT A REVERSE GROVER HERE!

But because she’s so invisible to everybody, nobody ever reads it. So, while lying on the floor in the middle of everybody walking around, she writes one of these letters to her best friend, who’s been missing for six weeks. Tookie explains to her friend that she’s doing her thirty-ninth “SPLD,” or “Silent Protest by Lying Down.” The first time I read through this, for some reason, I thought she was doing this protest because nobody was looking for her friend, but turns out she’s just doing it to protest the fact that nobody notices her.

I’m glad she’s not planning to show this letter to her friend because if I were missing for six weeks and my bestie spent that time writing letters to me about herself and her problems, I would be pissed.

Tookie writes her entries in different colors:

Every color represented a different language: flamingo-pink for Gowdee’an, cabernet-grape for Trés Jolie, mandarin-orange for BayJingle, and skyscraper-gray for Colorian, the language spoken in the distant land of SansColor.

Colorian? Not… No-Colorian? They speak Colorian in SansColor? I’m just trying to make sure I understand that choice.

No. No, I don’t think I will. [ed. I’m still baffled. Why would SansColorians speak Colorian? It’s like if English was the spoken language of the country of NonEngland.]

By the age of eleven, Tookie knew twenty-eight languages. Now, at fifteen, she spoke nearly every world tongue. The nagging truth, though, was that this incredible linguistic gift of Tookie’s seemed wasted—it was almost a cruel cosmic trick.

Heavy Matilda vibes.

Besides her sister, there’s only one person who’s ever talked to Tookie at school, and that’s the class president and resident hottie, Theophilus Lovelaces, and Tookie is way into him because one time, she tripped, and he helped her stand back up again.

It was the 2010s. Were you even writing a YA book if your heroine didn’t fall down in front of the hero?

Now, there’s this thing you’ll notice in some books, usually from the 2000s and early 2010s, where an author writing in the past tense will go into past-perfect to inform the reader that something is a memory or happened before the scene they’re currently reading. Which is absolutely how you should write it. But then this will happen:

But then a figure in a pin-striped jacket had appeared. Tookie’s vision was still blurry, but she could make out a small, round button on the figure’s lapel.

Do you see what happened there? The author will shift from past-perfect, back into past and stay there for the remainder of the flashback or memory until the last line of that section.

And that’s how we were told to write something like that. And reading it? Is confusing as fuck, especially when, for example, Tookie is already lying on the floor with Theophilus approaching her, and then the flashback is Tookie on the floor with Theophilus approaching her. But for genre fiction, that shit was maddeningly industry standard at that point in time.

So, Tookie is laying on the floor, hoping Theophilus will notice her. But then he trips, and his school president campaign button falls off and bounces off Tookie. And she’s like, I have to have this button because it touched Theophilus, and she’s straight-up obsessed with him.

Then she spied it. There! Near that pair of hairy legs! The legs belonged to Abigail Goode, who wore her superthick long, wavy black hair with pride—even from her armpits.

Good for her. And honestly? Good for this book, depicting an entire fashion-and-beauty-obsessed culture and including body hair as a deliberate fashion choice. This is one of those lines where I’m like, okay, if Tyra Banks didn’t write this whole thing, she at least wrote some of it, because body positivity and looking however the hell you want to look is a cornerstone of her philosophy.

Which is strange for a super model, I gotta say. But do what you need to do for your brand, I guess.

Tookie chases this button down as it gets stepped on and scratched up and eventually gets kicked into a trash can. This girl goes digging through the trash to find the button just because this boy touched it.

The button started out saying “Vote For Love,” but by the time it’s scraped over the floor, it just says T O OKE. She’s marvelling at this when she realizes that Theophilus is behind her. He asks her if she found what she was looking for, and Tookie thinks like, okay, this button with the scratched-off letters is a sign.

But uh-oh!

Tookie’s and Theophilus’s heads swiveled to the left. Zarpessa Zarionneaux strolled into the hallway.

If there’s an audiobook of this, the narrator deserves a raise.

With long, single-textured, bone-straight auburn hair, flawless skin that didn’t need an ounce of concealer, eyelashes that required not a stroke of mascara, and a tall, lean body kissed with subtle curves, she made every head in teh B3 hall whip in her direction.

…who’s out there wearing an ounce of concealer? Or multiple ounces, as the sentence implies?

But as you can probably guess, Zarpessa is Theophilus’s girlfriend, who writes with pens that have real gold in the ink and carries a five-thousand-dollar purse. So, Tookie knows she can’t compare.

It would take a miracle—no, not Tookie’s sister, but a real miracle—for Theophilus to notice her in the way she wanted.

Ouch for Myrracle. Dang.

So, that’s chapter one, our introduction to Tookie De La Créme, who is not Tyra Banks’s avatar, despite her billboard-sized forehead. [ed. For the record, I don’t think Tyra’s forehead is as big as she thinks it is.]