Waking up in the Land of Glitter by Kathy Cano-Murillo

"the most important element of design is to always keep the client in mind."

This is the story of Star (Estrella) Esteban and her search for herself.  Since she finished school, she has been drifting.  She runs the gallery that is part of her parents' restaurant and aspires to become a full fledged artist, though she hasn't yet determined what that means to her.  After a series of mishaps, her father gives her an ultimatum that she has to take responsibilty for herself, her career as an artist and to finish all those unfinished projects that she had started including the 200 centre pieces for the Arizona Craft Olympics. 


Star realizes she can't do this on her own.  She enlists the aid of her well-meaning, but craft challenged friend Ofie.  Ofie has the best of intentions and enthusiasm, but her crafts rarely suceed in the eyes of all thouse around her.  Also mixed in up to her perfectly groomed eyebrows is Crafty Chloe Chavez, reporter for the local Arizona TV station.  Turns out that Chloe, who is seen as the craft maven of Arizona, hates crafts and is a fraud.

I have to tell you that I absolutely loved this book.  It was fun and exciting.  The characters all came to life for me.  I found myself dreaming of glitter and searching my house for that random bottle of the stuff that I knew I had bought some time ago.  I found the low temp  glue gun and some sticks of glitter glue and went for it. 

Each of the three main characters was striped of her carefully built image and her faults were displayed for all to see and ridicule (if they so chose).  With each others help, they all rebuilt their lives better than they had been.  It made me feel good reading how the women helped each other when they could have walked away.   You can read this book as a fun and light book, or you can examine how Star, Ofie and Chloe almost destroyed their friendship with lies, omissions and good intentions, but for what ever reason you read it, you are sure to enjoy it.  This is a debut novel for the crafty chica/artist Kathy Cana-Murillo.

View a video of Kathy talking about her new book:

Now if I could only get myself a bag of that green glitter....

Thanks to Hachette Books for sending me this review copy.

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Zoey at Perpetually Piecing.