Beauties

"This novel is told from alternating viewpoints of two cousins--a former model and a woman with a disability--who run a cafâe in south St. Louis, Mo., in the 1990s and face challenges with love, adoption, the law, and urban life"--Provided by publisher.

Set in urban south St. Louis in the late 1990s, Beauties follows cousins Bev and Shelly as they open the Alibi Café and change the way each understands successin cooking, business, longing for parenthood, love, and, through their aunt's longing to win the Senior Ms. St. Louis Metropolitan Area contest, beauty. The book won the USA Book News' Best Books 2010 Award for Literary Fiction. In advance praise for the book, ForeWord Reviews writes that the characters' relationships to men, and ultimately, to one another, take this novel into a complex, lyrical territory that flirts with greatness. An audience seeking a stately, involved read about human relationships and the meaning of beauty  in all its forms will enjoy this beauty of a novel.

Fiction. "Mary Troy's BEAUTIES is a lovely novel, a character-driven anatomy of the odds and ends of relations and friends we cobble together in the modern age as our most beloved possession, our true family. Set in the mean streets of south St. Louis in the endearing, if always failing, Alibi Café, BEAUTIES follows the cynical, one-legged Bev, and the strikingly gorgeous Shelly, as they serve up generous heapings of biscuits and gravy to a ragtag motley of troubled and endearing souls who gravitate to the haven the café offers. Love percolates like drip coffee as Shelly seeks fulfillment with a duplicitous P.I., as the beleaguered Bev struggles through red tape to adopt the neglected Toby from a world that wants to destroy him. More than anything, the ultimate lesson of BEAUTIES is one that deserves the vivid and emotional investigations Troy lavishes on it: that though the world on its surface seems a bruised and broken place, true beauty lies beneath if we only stop to look"Tony D'Souza.