Product Description

Tabitha's Beauty Parlour is a haven. The women who cross its portals enter a perfumed world where never a hard note is struck. To Tabitha, Beauty is a broad canvas from which she will draw out what she can. But when Chloe, Tabitha's trainee, sets out to prove that she can give her clients the makeover of a lifetime, the quest for feminine perfection achieves hilarious consequences...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #327093 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Customer Reviews

Getting better all the time...
I like Mavis Cheek's work, but I think it was a mistake that I started with her later novels, "Getting Back Brahms" and "Three Men on a Plane". Her wonderful use of irony and subtle humour has matured. Here in "Sleeping Beauties" you can see more of the joins. It is still a great story and an interesting idea, but I feel it is somewhat naively rendered. It tends to the black and white for the longest time, and the message is to be seen coming from a mile off. In the later books the technical side of things has been smoothed out and there are a lot more grey areas which allow for more realistic representation. As an early work it is great, compared to the later stuff it lacks somewhat. Nevertheless an entertaining and worthwhile read.

Cheeky and fun...with lots of wit!
This is only the first of Mavis Cheek's novels which I have read. The story is about Tabitha's beauty salon, a place where women come from miles around to allow Tabitha and her assistant Chloe to work their magic on them. Over the years Tabitha has, in her eyes at least, made the salon into a sort of paradise on earth - somewhere women can be pampered and preened beyond their wildest dreams. However, Tabitha is fast approaching retirement age and feels she has actually had enough of the world of the beauty salon and is ready to move on. Chloe, although young and beautiful, is sometimes prone to crude outbursts and has some odd notions of what is best for the customer. Tabitha has her doubts about her possible successor and so sets her a challenge to decide if she can earn this oh-so-precious mantle...with very funny consequences.

I would agree with the earlier reviewer in that you can probably foresee the overall ending but that didn't take away from my enjoyment of this novel in the least. It was entertaining to follow what specifically happens in the three 'made-over' women's lives. I very much enjoyed Mavis Cheek's satirical style and there were more than one or two laugh out loud moments (something which I find novels often promise but rarely deliver). This is very much a book about women and so any male characters play a secondary role but I found that Cheek's writing brought each character to life (as far as was necessary) and I had a clear picture of each of them in my mind's eye.

If I had to choose one negative I would say I was sometimes a little confused by the overall style of the novel. The subject matter and how it is treated is fairly light and frothy but references to scheming goddesses throughout and a chapter on women's representation in art through the ages seemed not to fit so well with the rest of the novel. I can understand the point that the beauty salon is the modern equivalent of painters dictating what feminine perfection is but stylistically it jarred slightly with me. Having said that, it did bring substance to the novel and stopped it from being a funny but instantly forgettable tale. I am interested to know what other reviewers thought about this area.

I will definitely read more of the author's work as I did enjoy this one and am interested to know how her style develops over her many novels.