Penelope

  
So, if you read the description of the book, it's pretty much spot on.  It's about a girl with a pig's nose (not the entire face, only the nose because the rest was removed) who has been hidden away in her home for all of her life, meeting wealthy, blue-blooded men in order to find one to marry.  The family interpreted the cure for the curse as this: it can only my lifted if she marries another blue blood.  Along the way, she end up falling for a man trying to expose her, but he finds he has simil

  
So, if you read the description of the book, it's pretty much spot on.  It's about a girl with a pig's nose (not the entire face, only the nose because the rest was removed) who has been hidden away in her home for all of her life, meeting wealthy, blue-blooded men in order to find one to marry.  The family interpreted the cure for the curse as this: it can only my lifted if she marries another blue blood.  Along the way, she end up falling for a man trying to expose her, but he finds he has similar feelings, so he ditches the idea entirely and kind of disappears from the story.  Then Penelope decides (at age twenty-five) to finally leave home in order to experience the real world and find herself.  "Making new friends along the way, she discovers happiness in the most unexpected places."  The end.

  
So this book was originally a movie.  Yes I wrote that correctly.  Usually movies are made after the books, but Penelope was adapted from the screenplay.  I saw the movie before I read this and thought it was so cute that I had to buy it, and I still watch it every once in a while.  In addressing the book, I thought some things about the story line could have been a little more exact.  Yes, I've heard of poetic license and everything, but there were some changes that really bothered me.  Granted, a few of them were small things, like where she sat and looked through the one way mirror to interview the bachelors.  In the movie, it was in her room, in the book, it was in the dining room.  It was small little things like that that I think should have been pulled straight from the movie because it effected the situation so that I found it wasn't close enough to the original inspiration.  After watching the movie, I had all these great scenes in my mind, and the book was set up perfectly.  I found it extremely disappointing that so many opportunities were missed when writing the book.

  
The writing style wasn't that bad, though.  For the most part, it pretty good, but I wasn't getting that special something that should have made it go the extra mile.  Yet I think some of that was the issue with character development.  A few characters, like Penelope, of course, were incredibly well developed, yet others fell flat for me.  I understand that the movie/script didn't delve real deep into some of the characters, but if anything, the extent that we get to know the characters is what should have been altered from the movie.  I have no idea if this was the original script writer/movie company or whatnot absolutely not allowing it, so I'm not trying to blame the author.  Still, I wanted to know more about Lemon and (view spoiler)[Max (Johnny) (hide spoiler)] and Annie.  Even at (view spoiler)[Penelope's wedding (hide spoiler)], the bartender who she was supposedly friends with is just referred to as "the bartender."  No name.  And of course for the fact that Max visited Penelope three times and that's just about it until the very end.  That's not enough for me.

  
Penelope herself was a bit of a problem, too.  Now this is not the author's fault, it was just how the character was originally written, but I feel like some big points have been skirted around.  For example, SHE IS AND ADULT.  Do you hear that?  An adult!  She can legally drink, yet somehow her parents seem to think that they can still tell her what to do and she accepts it.  If Penelope didn't like having to have dozens of eligible men paraded around in front of her, she didn't have to!  I felt that when she finally left home, it was a little underwhelming, because she had been hiding behind her mother's skirt for so long, complaining, when she could have just left and spared herself seven years of torture.  I understand that she apparently didn't know how the world worked, so maybe she was scared, but after wanting freedom for so long, that seems almost ridiculous.  Which brings me to my second point.  She makes a big deal of stating how much she read and watched TV and movies.  This confuses me, because when she walks into a hotel she has no idea that she actually has to pay for a room.  To me, that seems like something that could be easily deducted from any number of books and movies.

  
In general though, it has a cute story line and I still enjoy the movie.  I think most of this book's issues is that it comes from the screenplay, and movies can get away with a lot more than books can.  So for the most part, the author did a good job with what she was handed.  I wouldn't say this is one of those books you absolutely have to read, but it's good for some clean entertainment.