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Summary
Summary
A woman obsessed with physical perfection, Aurora Jeanine Johnson hands over her life to Charles Worthington, a controlling, powerful, and wealthy eccentric who hopes to live out his kinky fantasies with her.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Pygmalion goes to the gym in this tawdry expos of the fetishistic, dangerous world of women's bodybuilding. Charles Worthington, a middle-aged, sexually eccentric millionaire, finds his Galatea in Aurora Jeanine Johnson, a single mom with big bodybuilding dreams. Young, blonde Aurora arrives from Savannah, Ga., in search of a new life and a new body on the West Coast. Charles spots her on a beach, then tracks her down at the gym where she is training, and the two strike up a bizarre, co-dependent relationship. In exchange for financial support and full-time training, Aurora becomes her mentor's sexual playthingÄthough her instant and ongoing subjugation to the repulsive Charles defies all logic. Together, their goal is for Aurora to win a title in a top national competition. In exchange for working toward her dream, Charles takes complete control of Aurora's lifeÄdictating her diet, her lifestyle, her training and her huge intake of steroids. As her training progresses, Aurora loses control over her life and neglects her young daughter, Amy. Supporting characters crawl out from beneath various rocks: a deranged ex-boyfriend named Skip DeBilda, who befriends Amy; Hendrik, Aurora's crooked trainer; and a motley cast of pumped-up grotesques at the gym. The writing is peppered with descriptions of bad outfits and sex acts so arcane as to be downright laughable. Arnoldi does try to provide an insider's look at this outlandish corner of the subculture, based on her own experience as a professional bodybuilderÄtoo bad it's overshadowed by the porn. (Mar.) Forecast: This galley came to PW with two author photos, one a glam head shot of Arnoldi, the other of her in a pink bikini, flexing in triumph as the 1992 Southern California Bodybuilding Champion. She looks good in both, but it's obvious which one, if put on the book jacket, is going to galvanize browser attention. In any case, the publisher has some interesting marketing plans, including advertising in Women's Sports and Fitness, that should boost sales. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A Los Angelesset first novel about the obsessive cult of womens bodybuilding. When bodybuilding champion May leaves him, Charles Worthington, a wealthy southern California eccentric, patrols the Venice gyms for a new woman to sponsor. Charles is something new in fiction: a serial sculptor, owner, and destroyer of womens bodies. Into his gym life, and into the laboratory of his sponsorship, comes Aurora Jeanine Johnson, a single mother from the Deep South, and between them there occurs something of the telegraphy of sculptor and stone. Soon Aurora isnt just lifting and training as per Charless instructions, but shes also eating, drinking, and injecting whatever shes told to. Charles chisels Aurora from hard-body wannabe to comic book superhero to sex toythe object of Charless fantasies. At first, thats an easy enough price for Aurora to pay. Shes always aspired to a bodybuilding physique, and Charless subsidies enable her to bring her teenaged daughter Amy to L.A. as well. But, like her body, the price Aurora pays grows in increments. The demands of the gym floor, the regimen of the kitchen, and the humiliation of the bedroom take their toll. Under all the growth hormones, Auroras clitoris enlarges as her voice drops. Meanwhile, Charless attraction to manly women develops into a compulsion for Doughdee, a black dominatrix with shoulders linebacker wide, while a resentful and neglected Amy wobbles on trendy cowboy boots that her thickening frame cant master. Arnoldi shows herself to be an impeccable, and sometimes lyrical, authority on the world she describes, providing litanies of the obsessions that gym rats developthe work-out regimens, the growth drugs, the nauseating side-effectsall juxtaposed with fastidious descriptions of Charless sexual performances, where thrusts are counted like weightlifters reps. The occasionally flabby prose and muscle-bound characterization undercut the impact of an exposé thats equal parts a Pumping Iron-documentary and a Harold Robbins shock-me please.
Booklist Review
Arnoldi, a Southern California bodybuilder and first-time novelist, revisits Venice Beach in the 1980s, when Gold's Gym glamorized female bodybuilding, a peculiar blend of athleticism and exhibitionism that involves, in this tautly written, over-the-top tale, not just sweat and tears but body-altering drugs and soul-crushing prostitution. Charles Worthington, a wormy little rich man with an erotic fixation on female bodybuilders whose competitiveness belies their self-respect, finds the perfect accomplice in Aurora Jeanine Johnson. A penniless single mother from Georgia, she jumps at the chance to become a champion and introduce her teenage daughter to the good life. And the cash, jewels, Porsche, and house aren't bad either. But she has no time for her increasingly despondent daughter, so busy is she enacting Charles' pathetic sexual fantasies and following the arduous instructions of her nasty trainer. With chilling specificity, Arnoldi describes every chiseled, hypodermic-penetrated inch of Aurora's abused, pumped-up body and the monstrous metamorphosis she ultimately suffers, one that pushes the boundaries of health, gender, humanness, and sanity. Arnoldi's searing tale, a true binge read, boldly dramatizes the consequences of narcissism and misplaced ambition. --Donna Seaman