Beauty before comfort

I found this in a charity shop and it took my fancy. Being the kind of person who has always put comfort before beauty, the title tickled me a bit.
The book is about the authors grandmother, the beautiful Aneita Jean Blair who grows up in a small town in west Virginia before and during the second world war.
Aneita is full of ambition and wants to make her way out of the small town she lives in and on to bigger and better things that she feels she's entitled to.
The book is very atmospheric and gives you a good feel of the potentially claustrophobic nature of small town life.
As I was reading this I found that whilst enjoying the writing itself I didn't really connect with Aneita. As her dreams are stifled and she starts to see the impossibility of escaping you kind of watch her atrophy and sour.
As the story progressed I found myself not liking her much at all. I felt like you were meant to like her despite some of the things she does due to her wit and beauty but I personally couldn't get over the feeling that if I met her, I'd hate her.
True she goes through a lot of trauma and she does deserve sympathy but once again plenty of other people who lived in that town would have had hard lives and didn't do the things that she does.
One example that stays with me is when aneita uses her relationship with her married boss to steal her friends better job. Obviously they didn't remain friends afterwards.
It just seemed like due to her beauty she feels like she's entitled to more than others and that nothing was out of bounds in the way that she got it.
We see her messing around with married men that she doesn't love, playing around with peoples feelings in general and the only reason that you get for any of this is that the town was just too small for her brilliance.
It also felt like you were meant to agree with this, but I'm afraid that it just didn't cut the mustard with me.
Plenty of people need to get out of a miserable life and I just hated the implication that one person is more deserving of getting out than another for either their wit or beauty as a reason. Don't we all deserve to be happy and not trapped by circumstances that suck the life out of us?
I know that plenty of other people will read this differently to me and I've got to be honest and say that whiles I was coming to these conclusions I started to feel uncomfortable as this wasn't a fictional character that I disliked but the authors grandmother who she obviously adored.
I really felt bad for not liking her grandmother but I'm afraid that that's how I felt, saying all this the book is very well wrote and full of background information that really adds to the atmosphere.
Whilst not being a book that I'll ever read again it was a gritty and substantial read. I really wouldn't want anyone to not read it just because I said that I didn't like her, Aneita isn't a wholly evil character or anything.
In fact she's full of fire and wit and is a great character for a book, like I said before it's a personal prejudice and I really wouldn't have wanted to meet her.
As for the food side of this although we are told that she is a great baker and that "she swore that the day she used a box mix for cake was the day they might as well put her away" I didn't feel right cooking another cake for this book.
In the end I settled for a passage when she's taken out to an Italian steakhouse during the war by a gentleman that she's seeing. Given the circumstances of rationing I can only imagine what a treat this must have been.
I'm afraid that once again I don't have any pictures. What was described in the book was a meal consisting of a steak, vegetables, potatoes and iceberg lettuce served with Italian dressing.
I don't feel confident in given you a recipe for this sort of meal as I'm not a confident steak cooker and the dressing for the Italian dressing I made was just olive oil and red wine vinegar.
It was a lovely meal though and being of extra sentimental value to me as it's the first steak I've had since I had my tooth removed in September.
In my next review I promise to give a proper recipe for the book, and I have got some exciting things I'm planning to cook soon! Can't wait.