Selling My Books on the Streets of Brooklyn 3/31

The floating bookshop was closed today due to inclement weather. I'm still stuffed from lunch. After her visit to the doctor, Arlynn treated me to lasagna at V&S, right across the street and facing Sheepshead Bay. To my surprise, the shop is run by Italians, rare these days. I hadn't had lasagna in a long time. It is one dish my brother in law does not cook. I wiped the plate clean with garlic bread. I can still smell it on me.
I had plenty of time to attend to chores and to finish Paulina Porizkova's first novel, A Model Summer (2007). Porizkova, born in 1965, was one of the top supermodels of the '80's, twice on the cover of Sports Illustrated's swimsuit edition. She has also acted in films and videos. A Model Summer is the story of a 15 year old Swedish girl of Czechoslovakian descent who receives an invitation to work in Paris for three months. On her own, sweet, virginal, naive, she experiences a complete change of life, a loss of innocence. She navigates the dog-eat-dog of the real world and falls prey to its vices. The strength of the novel is the portrait of the inner Jirina, her competitiveness, vulnerability, insecurity, jealousy and egomania, the classic teenager struggling to find a place in the world. The narrative brought out the conservative in me, worried she was growing up too fast. I frequently have to remind myself that life, values have changed dramatically since the late '60's, and I do so by telling myself: "It's a modern world." It's not going to adapt to me. I have to adapt to it, no matter how appalling I find some of it. There isn't anything that isn't plausible in the book. How closely it mirrors Porizkova's real life is anyone's guess. I was unable to find anything relevant about it on the web. On the one hand, she did go to Paris on her own as a teenager; on the other, her younger sibling is male, not female. Given this change, the work must be taken as fiction. Nevertheless, it rings true. I don't know how many copies it has sold, but I enjoyed it more than I did the million seller mystery/thrillers I've sampled, with the exception of Tami Hoag's A Thin Dark Line.  On a scale of five: three-and-a-half. How unfair that someone so beautiful is also intelligent enough to write a good novel. Porizkova is married to rock star/ producer Ric Ocasek of the Cars, who had a great run in '80's. They have two sons.
Read Vic's stories, free: http://vicfortezza.homestead.com/