Prettier If She Smiled More is the seventh novel by award-winning, best-selling Australian author, Toni Jordan, and the second to feature the Schnabel family. After two decades working as a pharmacist in the pharmacy she fully intends to buy when her boss Tim retires, Kylie Schnabel is super-organised; she likes to be in control of her life (some would say she’s rigid), preferring predictability over variety. “Narrow horizons were a strength because it was easier to make everything perfect when there were fewer things to worry about.”

But Kylie is having a terrible week: on Monday morning she discovers the pharmacy has been sold to mega-retail-chain, Pharmacy King, and she will have to apply for her own job! Meanwhile, as she works, Pharmacy King’s Gail Osborne is evaluating her performance…

Next, she discovers (thank you, Fitbit!) that her boyfriend is cheating on her. And then commiserations at a cocktail bar turn into complications when her mum, Gloria breaks an ankle (three martinis plus stilettos), and is going to need someone (no, not an agency nurse, absolutely not!!) to look after her.

Kylie can’t help taking control, writing and distributing one of her legendary SOPs so the family knows exactly what needs doing, but she soon realises that she should have tried “something easier than looking after Gloria, like solving the homelessness crisis or mediating between North and South Korea.” And being back in her childhood home, exposed to all its loaded memories isn’t helping her frame of mind.

A children’s tennis coach, Gloria points out that her annual Open Day is on Saturday and absolutely cannot be cancelled: “It was the biggest day of her year, when she signed up students for the term to come.” No way Kylie’s getting involved in that, her sporty brother Nick will have to step up.

In the interest of keeping her job, she somehow finds herself babysitting a spoiled Pomeranian (Caesar) then, as if she hasn’t enough on her plate, reluctantly goes on a blind date, and insists on preparing the family’s Sunday lunch.

As Kylie’s life is turned upside down and she is evicted from her boring but safe and comfortable rut, she begins, painfully, to see that not always being in control, not getting to live the life she had meticulously planned, doesn’t have to be a disaster.

Jordan’s characters will be familiar to the reader, people we all know amongst our acquaintances, and their dialogue and behaviour is what we hear and see in our daily lives. Kylie is earnest and intelligent, full of integrity and good intentions but, for a smart woman, she does fall prey rather easily to her family’s reverse psychology.

Gloria Schnabel, the manipulative matriarch who is unequivocally convinced she knows what is best, is hugely entertaining and issues opinions that will resonate with many readers: “It’s terribly depressing being the same age as old people” and “Rules exist for a reason, Kylie. And that reason is to identify people who lack the imagination to think for themselves so the rest of us know whom to avoid” are examples.

With her unfailing talent for writing humour, Jordan endows her characters with plenty of wit and hilarity, as well as giving them some wise words and insightful observations. And she does manage, within pages, to have the reader laughing out loud, then choking up with emotion. Funny and feel-good, Toni Jordan’s latest novel is an undiluted joy to read.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by Hachette Australia.