MixedThe New York TimesAt first Look at Me seems to be heading down a predictable path, with heartwarming lessons to be learned about how interior and exterior life merge and deviate. Yet Egan is up to something more tricky here...Egan's agenda involves more than a model's identity quest. She quickly introduces a second narrative: the coming-of-age story of a teenage girl back in Rockford who happens to be the daughter of Charlotte's estranged childhood best friend – and, in a top-that-doppelgänger move, is also named Charlotte … Look at Me strains under the weight of Egan's multiple ambitions, and her satire of the fashion world and dot-com mania is facile and only sporadically funny. The older Charlotte remains something of a cipher – intentionally so, one suspects; Egan never quite explains what it must feel like to walk through the world so anonymously and yet still unaltered at the core. Even so, substantial portions of this novel are truly moving.
