The premise of "A Little Change of Face" is that beautiful, confident Scarlett receives too much attention from men, so she alters her appearance to be less attractive. Her goal is to find out whether men are really interested in her, or just attracted by her looks.
The first problem with all this is that there's no antithesis. Nobody ever really believes - nobody ever even argues, and I can't think of any reason why they should - that men will *not* stop constantly hitting on Scarlett, and buying her drinks in bars and asking her out under no provocation, if she cuts her hair very short, wears ugly glasses, and dons long, baggy dresses to hide her gorgeous figure. From the beginning, the novel conflates this sort of empty and surface-oriented attention with the (generally) deeper regard signified by friendship and real romantic interest. Even Scarlett seems to have no opinon at all on the subject; she seems barely notice the attention she receives, and she has no boyfriend or close male friend at the start of the novel to give another perspective.
So Scarlett goes through a sort of reverse physical blossoming. In the process she changes her name to Lettie, sabotages her career by moving to a lower-level position in a different town, and gives up her condominium to rent a less showy home. She decides to revise not only her appearance but her entire personality, remaking herself as the self-effacing, unglamorous person she imagines a dowdy, bespectacled Lettie would be. This explicit assumption that a less beautiful woman would be less outgoing and sociable is a circular proof of the hypothesis that as an average-looking woman Scarlett will receive less notice. She goes through the usual contortions of trying to attract the most gorgeous and shallow of the men she meets and - in a bit of poetic justice apparently unnoticed by its recipient - manages to develop, for the first time, a personality not based on long hair and big breasts.
Whatever "A Little Change of Face" is supposed to be, it fails. Its agenda - which is both overworked and unpleasant - hampers its enjoyability as fluff. But its desire to be fluff (in accordance with its Red Dress Ink label) hinders its ability to be interesting in any other way. This is really too bad, as the author is obviously talented. She manages to turn a shell of a plot and a few barely-there characters into a marginally pleasant, absorbing three-hundred page book. And she has certainly tapped into some interesting questions of style versus substance, how much of who we are is influenced by how we look, and the importance of physicality to self-concept and our interactions with friends, coworkers, and lovers. Few novels manage to wrestle successfully with this issue, though, and most of them are much more complex than this immature anti-Cinderella tale.
