The God of Good Looks: A Novel

Combining the raw honesty of Queenie and the warmth of a modern-day Bridget Jones’s Diary, this entertaining, transportive, and luminous debut novel from award-winning writer Breanne Mc Ivor follows a young Trinidadian woman finding her voice and reclaiming her name.

Bianca Bridge is at her wit’s end. Fired from her editorial job after scandalizing Trinidad’s tight, conservative society by having an affair with a married government official, she’s resorting to modeling for even the sleaziest of photographers to make ends meet. Her mother, were she still alive, would be stunned by whom her daughter has become. Her father—and his ample checkbook—is off somewhere with his second family. And the government official? It was his wife who got her fired.

With nothing left to lose, Bianca takes a job assisting the brilliant but aloof makeup artist Obadiah Cortland, a rising star in the Trinidadian beauty community. Yet Obadiah is not the elite tyrant he seems. Born in the poorest part of Trinidad, he’s clawed partway up society’s ladder and built his company around his meticulously crafted persona. And he’s not about to let anyone see past his façade.

As Bianca’s ex-lover continues to wield power over her and the colleagues she’s come to love, she, with Obadiah’s help, finally decides she’s ready to fight back like her mother taught her—and to reconsider, at last, the nature of what, and whom, might deserve to be called beautiful.

Alternating between Bianca’s irreverent yet poignant diary entries and Obadiah’s clear-eyed first-person narrative, The God of Good Looks portrays the everyday realities of modern Trinidad’s rigid class barriers and the fraught impact of beauty commodification in a patriarchal society. Amusing and entertaining, yet sharp-witted and full of meaty, universally relatable questions, Mc Ivor’s sparkling debut is an open-hearted, awakening tale about finding one’s voice.