Lucy Jayne Wright

Warning for minor discussion of self-harm.

“Goodness great-shoes!” (p 3) Where do I even start? This review is going to be incoherent because there’s no coherent way to describe this book.

I read Tyra Banks’ Modelland back in 2011, when it came out, and it was so goddamn weird that it stuck with me. A couple weeks ago, I described it to my partner over a bottle of wine. Obviously, they dared me to reread and review it. I’m terrible at backing down from dares, so here we are.

The book opens with an address from…someone? They’ve got a ton of personality, but their identity remains a mystery to me. They read like a Disney fairy godmother played by RuPaul as they describe the fog shrouded mountain where Modelland looms over the entire world like Olympus for pretty people. “You spend 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.” (p1) Honestly solid. Our godmother goes on to describe the light that Modelland emits, saying “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.” (p 2) 

Modelland can take any run-of-the-mill, preternaturally attractive girl and make her into an Intoxibella, a “Stunning, Statuesque, Strobotronic Star with [a] Stupefying Strut” (p 67) with super powers like Chameeleoné (shapeshifting), ThirtyNever (instead of turning thirty, a girl with ThirtyNever begins her next year looking seventeen again, over and over until she dies), Excite-to-Buy (makes everyone who looks at her desperate to spend money), or Teleportaling (teleporting). 

If a girl has all seven known superpowers, she becomes a Triple7. The most famous Triple7 in the world, Ci~L, is basically a goddess. And she’s missing. Everyone is panicked.

Every girl—every single girl in the world—wants to go to Modelland, except, we’re told, our heroine: Tookie. In reality, she confesses to wanting it immediately when asked, but we need to understand early that she’s not like other girls. Tookie is not ugly, but not really proportional. She’s heterochromatic and her hair is every possible texture. She speaks every language in the world and is so socially invisible she lays in her school hallways hoping someone will step on her. 

Tookie’s best and only friend, Lizzie, routinely escapes the local mental hospital to live in a tree. She hallucinates unspecified horrors and cuts herself with sharp rocks. (If you think this book handles self-harm or mental health well, buckle up.) Tookie’s sister, Myrracle, is gorgeous, catty, and dumb. Their mother, Creamy, is obsessed with getting Myrracle into Modelland, no matter what. Their father is convinced Tookie isn’t pretty enough to be his child, and wants to sell her into enslavement at a fast fashion factory.

Tookie leaves them all behind after a token from the school comes out of the sink Harry Potter-style and she’s selected in a Hunger Games choosing ceremony where a mysterious scout shoves her into a sack and flies her around the world. And here, we’re going to pause to discuss the world of Modelland.

The countries are mostly real world countries with stereotyped names ranging from the sort of clever (Gowdee, after the architect Gaudi) to boring (TooLip, Oktooberfest, Très Jolie) to insulting (Chakra). I had a great time being mildly horrified and yelling new county names at my partner every time they walked through the living room, but it’s ultimately pretty boring compared to glimpses of the world’s more fantastical countries. The scout makes stops in Bou-Big-Tique Nation, a country inside a Walmart; Canne DelAbra, where all the world’s candles come from (also candles might be their money and their medicine?); and Sans Color, where the albino population lives under a dome in the ruins of a concrete jungle, which protects them from lizard-beasts that want to eat their pancreases. 

Aside from picking up our new friends, Dylan, a curvy, Southern blonde prone to fainting; Shiraz, a tiny, freckled speedster; and Piper, the daughter of the prime minister of Sans Color, we never hear much more about these countries. I would have been so into hearing more about Bou-Big-Tique, damnit.

Anyway, the scout dumps Tookie and the other girls, none of whom look like typical Modelland girls, out of the sack in their new home, reveals herself to be the missing goddess Ci~L, and disappears after dropping them off at orientation. 

We meet the other applicants including a snooty bully from Tookie’s past, quadruplets who each say one word in a sentence, and a girl from Chakra who’s addicted to her psychic headphones (don’t wait for this tech to be expanded upon). I will give it to this book, every character has a look and we’re clearly supposed to see how they’re expressing themselves with that look and that’s occasionally delightful? But more often stereotyped.

As the girls start their magical boarding school experience, I’m going to stop trying to summarize and just list some of the shit we encounter in Modelland. It’s easier that way.

• Failed Modelland candidates sometimes volunteer to be made into living mannequins loyal only to Modelland leadership.
• All the teachers are called “Guru” and must have some sort of flaw (hand for a head, roller skates for feet, made of food, ugly, gay) and some kind of power (sewing, super speed, “tongue-reading,” debating, and being really mean, respectively).
• Modelland magically stops the periods of all students because it would be inconvenient if they had to miss a photo shoot because of cramps.
• If you leave without permission, you age fifty years instantly.
• Belladonna, the headmistress, possesses statues of herself to keep watch on everyone and everything.
• Catty girls are turned into literal cats.
• There are magical spa ladies who make you relive your worst traumas so you can heal from them, somehow.
• You activate your superpowers by sucking in your stomach.

That’s not even half the wild shit that happens. Very little of it is plot relevant.

Anyway, Ci~L pops up a few more times, acting increasingly erratic. She whips herself while sobbing, is accused of doing terrifying things with dead girls’ bodies, and is generally tortured and punished for being “off message.” The girl looks like she’s having a catastrophic breakdown. Tookie witnesses a lot of this through some narratively convenient sleepwalking and comes to the conclusion that Ci~L is going to sacrifice her and her friends or experiment on them or… something? So, obviously, they need to escape.

Meanwhile, Tookie meets a male model from Modelland’s brother school—Bestosterone. His name is Bravo and his tragic backstory is that he’s so pretty no one respects his achievements or interest in architecture. He and Tookie plan to lose their “lip virginity” (p 412) to each other.

During their plans to make “lip nookie” (p 549), Tookie finds a way to escape under the cover of the school’s supermodel magic sport (every boarding school fantasy needs one), shoutcasted by the local threatening, evil gay, Guru Gunnero. Ci~L pursues them and reveals that she picked Dylan, Shiraz, and Piper because they reminded her of her dead foster sisters. She wants to redefine beauty so that they can feel beautiful too. 

Ci~L coaxes the girls back to school just in time for Tookie’s mother and sister to arrive after trekking up the mountain and fighting some honest to god Dark Souls monsters (for example, a giraffe-sized mass of severed arms with a face made of musical instruments, which the severed hands play) which seem vaguely related to the graves of some “muses” but if you think it’s addressed or explained, you’re dead wrong. Creamy demands to see the Belladonna and it’s revealed through convenient, unearned flashback that they had a major falling out when they were both students at Modelland, that Ci~L is the Belladonna’s daughter, that Tookie was chosen out of spite toward Creamy, and that both Creamy and Belladonna have done a lot of model crimes.

As a result, they’re both arrested and put in the Modelland dungeon, which I just don’t have time to explain. Ci~L is then crowned princess of Modelland (wait, this is a monarchy?) which magically cures her trauma and mental health issues, and she and Tookie go on adventures. It ends exactly that quickly.

I won’t say Modelland is good, or even a particularly inspired entry into the magical boarding school genre. It’s very, very 2011. Reading it also feels like running around in someone else’s unedited fantasy world, complete with their biases and issues. 

I will say it is uninhibitedly creative, which is sort of its problem—it feels like ideas are added as they come, with no real thought to how they fit into the web of the story. Sometimes you get a mass of severed arms playing a trombone, but it’s never explained in a way that makes any sense. Sometimes you get a dude with a hand for a head, but his name is Guru Applausez. With some editing, some inhibition, it might have gone somewhere and gotten the sequel it was clearly gunning for.