From the Bookshelf of The Wide Web of Friends in YA Books…

But it was her golden hair that caught the attention of most, hair that still maintained a glimmer of its glory. In short, Celaena Sardothien was blessed with a handful of attractive features that compensated for the majority of average ones; and, by early adolescence, she’d discovered that with the help of cosmetics, these average features could easily match the extraordinary assets.

”She loved clothes- loved the feeling of silk, of velvet, of satin, of suede and chiffon- and was fascinated by the grace of seams, the intricate perfection of an embossed surface. And when she won the ridiculous competition, when she was free... she could buy all the clothes she wanted.”

”She’d been trained to be an assassin since the age of eight, since the day the King of the Assassins found her half-dead on the banks of a frozen river and brought her to his keep.”

”She’d wasted away to nothing. Beneath her nightgown, her ribs reached out from inside of her, showing bones where flesh and meat should have been And her breasts! Once well-formed, they were now no larger than they’d been in the midst of puberty.”