Winner, 2017 IPPY Bronze Medal for Popular Fiction

When twenty-two-year-old Marla finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, she wishes for a family, but faces precariousness: an uncertain future with her talented, exacting boyfriend, Liam; constant danger from her roommate, Dani, a sometime prostitute and entrenched drug addict; and the unannounced but overwhelming needs of her younger brother, Gavin, whom she has brought home for the first time from deaf school. Forcing her hand is Marla's fetal alcohol syndrome, which sets her apart but also carries her through. When Marla loses her job and breaks her arm in a car accident, Liam asks her to marry him. It's what she's been waiting for: a chance to leave Dani, but Dani doesn't take no for an answer. Marla stays strong when her mother shows up drunk, creates her own terms when Dani publicly shames her, and then falls apart when Gavin attempts suicide. It rains, and then pours, and when the Bow River finally overflows, flooding Marla's entire neighbourhood, she is ready to admit that she wants more for her child than she can possibly give right now. Marla's courage to ask for help and keep her mind open transforms everyone around her, cementing her relationships and proving to those who had doubted her that having a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder does not make a person any less noble, wise or caring.

Jennifer Spruit grew up in Lloydminster, AB/SK, alongside pump jacks, farm machinery, and its endless, sparkling winter sky. Her affair with writing began with a Grade One story about a tractor, but she has since become engaged in writing about people. She studied Creative Writing at UBC and now lives in Courtenay, on Vancouver Island, where she enjoys playing folk and bluegrass, teaching kids, and rowing a blue canoe. Her work has appeared in Arc, The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire Magazine, and SubTerrain Magazine, among others. A Handbook for Beautiful People is her debut novel. She is currently at work on a second novel.

Jennifer Spruit's profile page

• Winner, IPPY Awards Bronze Medal - Popular Fiction

"Wonderful, heartfelt, heartbreaking-I can't recommend this novel highly enough."
-Annabel Lyon, author of The Sweet Girl

"Jennifer Spruit has such a distinct, poignant voice, and her briiliant debut novel A Handbook For Beautiful People highlights this perfectly. Through sharp characters and their complications, a driven narrative develops, enveloping us before we have a chance to judge. Jump into this novel. It will sweep you up."
-Joseph Boyden, author of The Orenda

Raw, Gritty, and Gut Wrenching -

by James Spruit

I don’t think that I’ve read anything as raw, gritty, or gut-wrenchingly helpless and emotional as A Handbook for Beautiful People. Featuring Marla, a twenty-two year-old woman who has partial fetal alcohol syndrome thanks to an alcoholic/drug abusing mother who practically abandoned her and her deaf brother to foster care when they were young, as she struggles with two low paying jobs and a slew of friends who just can’t seem to be fully functioning members of society.
Bewitched Book Worms

Marla works as a waitress and a medical records assistant, and she shares a house with her drug addicted/part-time prostitute roommate Dani. While Dani helps Marla remember to do things like pay the bills and go to work on time–things that Marla struggles with due to her partial FAS–Marla helps Dani in a lot of ways as well. Marla has been dating cello teacher Liam for several months, and when she finds herself pregnant, she doesn’t tell perfectionist Liam right away. Marla is happy about the pregnancy, thinking that she can be the type of mother to the child that she and her brother Gavin did not have, but her dreams are quickly squashed after she tells her foster parents and Liam about the baby. With her deaf brother Gavin visiting for an extended stay, Marla sees that his life isn’t as good as she thought it was since he went off to a special school. He’s isolated and has anger issues, and Dani finds that he can be easily manipulated.

With ideas of adoption, abortion, or raising the child on her own swimming through her head, Marla certainly doesn’t have any more room to deal with unemployment, a burgeoning romance between Dani and Gavin, or especially the breakdown of her relationship with the father of her baby.

Jennifer Spruit did a fantastic job writing terribly flawed characters that I just couldn’t stop reading about. Every character made mistakes and stepped right on to the brink where they could see where they were heading. Sometimes they stepped over the line, but sometimes they realized that they should take a step back. A Handbook for Beautiful People highlighted two disabilities that you don’t really see written about much these days, and these characters where delved into with emotion, depth, and immense thoughtfulness that left me with a realistic sense of these players as actual people.