Book Review: Nobody’s Girl, by Sarra Manning

Bea is tired of being boring. Her life revolves around school and her dull Saturday job, and she longs for everything to be more interesting. When her ex-best friend Ayesha wants to hang out again, and introduces her to the school’s queen bee, Ruby, and her group of cool party-girls, Bea goes along with it, reluctantly, because what else does she have to do? She believes it’s all a joke until she’s invited along on their trip to Malaga – but things go rapidly downhill once they arrive in Spain.

Bea leaves the other girls behind and joins a group of American tourists heading for France – where she believes the father she’s never met is waiting. But when she tells her Mum about her plans, she’s furious. Will Bea ever find out why? Will gorgeous American Toph ever explain why he acts so weird around her? Will Ruby murder her when she gets back to London?

Of course I loved Nobody's Girl. It was pretty much inevitable, because I've enjoyed all of Sarra Manning's other books, and her writing just keeps on getting better and better. Every book seems to have more description and wit in it than before, and the characterisation becomes more detailed each time as well. Nobody’s Girl is really well paced. Some readers will find the last section back in London a bit rushed, but I think it’s meant to feel that way. And in Nobody’s Girl there is a heroine who is actually honestly like me.

I always wanted to be Edie from the Diary of a Crush trilogy but was never cool enough to befriend/romance art boys or own vintage dresses or get a job as a waitress and live above the café. I could relate a lot to Irina from the Fashionistas series but I’ve never been that aggressive or rude. I could totally sympathise with Bea. Even now I still long a little to be more interesting, to read books in cafes and go to the theatre every week and have long intellectual conversations with people in appropriately shabby-glamourous venues. I loved the bits where Bea daydreams about living in Paris and having an eccentric lover to have passionate rows with (it was really great that Sarra chose one of those bits to read aloud at the Chicklish birthday event). I know how easy it is to get swept up in someone else’s whirlwind and find yourself hanging out with people that are exciting but kind of despicable.

The only place where we diverge is…Toph. Still not hotter than Dylan. I suppose he comes second though. (Only out of Sarra Manning love interests. He’s way down the list if you’re talking all books because so many places go to boys from the Ruby Oliver series).

I would recommend Nobody’s Girl to everyone! If you’re already a fan of Sarra Manning, you’ll probably love it, if you’ve never read any of her books, this is a fabulous place to start. It didn’t jump into my favourite spot, but it was a great story with brilliant characters and I enjoyed it enormously. If I didn't have so many other books to read, I'd be re-reading it right now!

P.S. I am ridiculously excited over, of all nerdy things, being able to tag this with 'writers I have met' - a tag I've only used once before!

Three Non-Fiction Suggestions

Ophelia Speaks: Adolescent Girls Write About Their Search for Self, edited by Sara Shandler, various contributors

Ophelia Speaks is a response to an earlier book, Reviving Ophelia, and contains short essays, poetry, and other pieces of writing by American teenagers. There are two chapters about body issues, 'Media-Fed Images' and 'Eating Disorders'. The pieces are very short but it's interesting to see a range of snapshots from different lives, and what real teenagers think about their bodies. The rest of the book features pieces of writing about other issues affecting teenagers today, on subjects like abuse, depression, death, friendship, sex, racism, religion, and academic pressure.

The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women, by Naomi Wolf

I'll confess I haven't read the whole of this book yet - I read the first chapter, the last, 'Culture' and 'Hunger' for an essay I wrote whilst studying for my first degree. I do intend to read the rest soon. The Beauty Myth is a look at history, politics and advertising that shows how false the idea of beauty is and how it stops women from achieving as much as they could. It's not perfect, it has received a lot of criticism for only really looking at how the beauty myth affects middle-class, white, heterosexual and able-bodied women, and the accuracy of the statistics is often called into question. I'm aware that there are books and articles that go a bit more in depth and up to date, but as an intro to the ideas it presents, I think it does a good job. The third to last paragraph of the 'Hunger' chapter, beginning 'What if she doesn't worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do?' (p179-180 in 0701134313) is one of my favourite paragraphs of all time. I wish I could quote the whole thing here, but it'd probably go beyond fair dealing.

Wasted, by Marya Hornbacher

I'm reading this book at the moment and will post a full review when I'm done. It's a memoir by a recovering bulimic/anoretic. The author first decided that she was fat at the age of five. It's well written, but quite heavy going. My head was aching earlier today as I was reading it, just trying to imagine how a child so young would develop these ideas and become so ill. Also, although it's not a thick paperback, the font is quite small, so it's not ideal for reading with contacts in. I might have a better time tomorrow when I can just take my glasses off and hold it closer!

Book Review: I Was A Teenage Fairy, by Francesca Lia Block

Photo by Courtney Carmody // OpenEyesPhoto

Barbie’s mother used to be a beauty queen, but never made a successful career out of being a model. It is her dream for Barbie to achieve all she couldn’t, and so she drags the little girl to agency after agency, trying to persuade them to take her on. Barbie doesn’t want to be a model, she’s frightened of standing in front of the camera lens, and is more interested in the tiny fairy girl she found one day in her garden, who calls herself Mab. Eventually Barbie’s mother finds a photographer willing to photograph her, Hamilton Waverley, but he has a darker agenda.

Five years later, Barbie is a teenager haunted by what Hamilton Waverley did to her. Her mother spends all day in front of the television drinking, and Barbie sneaks out at night to go to parties. But one night Mab comes along with her, and everything starts to change when Barbie meets Griffin, another model who began working as a child, and Todd, an successful actor.

I have mixed feelings about Francesca Lia Block’s work. The writing is beautiful and there are passages in every book that I want to copy out and stick inside my wardrobe so that I can read them every day, but sometimes the description drowns out what’s actually going on and I find her plots to be too weakly present for me to really be able to get on with them. With some of the stories, like Echo, I finish reading and I can’t remember what actually happened, or I feel like I missed it. All the one-story books are very short, novellas rather than novels. This makes them easy to re-read, but all the characters and their issues are introduced very quickly and without much detail. The characters are very simply sketched. They’re not stereotypes, but they’re not fully fleshed out either. Francesca Lia Block has some great characters although after a few books I started to notice that she has favourite types to write about, and I find her teenagers more believable than the children. To sum it up, her writing doesn’t place style above substance in the conventional sense, because she deals with a lot of serious issues, but she treats everything with an ethereal touch.

I Was a Teenage Fairy, in my opinion, doesn’t have most of these flaws. The plot is tight and the passages that are just description break it up nicely and add to the atmosphere. Mab is the most memorable character, a beautiful fairy who isn’t very nice. She finds Barbie’s inaction frustrating and hates her mother. She’s also obsessed with men! Barbie is an introvert forced into the spotlight, brought up in a different family, she would spend most of her time reading, studying and thinking. I would have liked to know more about them, but I found them believable and interesting.

Barbie, named after the doll, is a model who wishes she could be on the other side of the camera. She doesn’t find herself beautiful, but other people clearly do. Her mother starts putting her on diets at age eleven, and buys her a Barbie doll for every birthday, wishing that her daughter would look like that. The book is set in Hollywood, and all of Barbie’s friends and acquaintances of the same age are models or actors. Barbie’s body image issues are never directly addressed, but she stops worrying about them as she gains the confidence to be herself and stop doing what her mother wants her to do.

If you haven’t read Francesca Lia Block before, I Was A Teenage Fairy is a good place to start. Fans often recommend you start with Block’s first novella, Weetzie Bat, which is what I did, but I wasn’t sure I liked it until the second read and it didn’t really make sense until I read the other books in the Dangerous Angelsseries! I think I Was A Teenage Fairy is more immediately accessible.

Book Review: The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler

Photo by Andie712b

Virginia Shreves feels like she doesn’t fit into her apparently perfect family. She could just about cope with being ignored when her sister Anais and her best friend Shannon were around, but now she’s alone. Virginia has no one to sit with during lunch at school, so she hides out in the toilets. She is convinced that Froggy, a boy she has regular kissing sessions with, would never want anyone to know about their relationship. Then one day in the girls’ bathroom, she hears one of the most popular girls at school saying that if she were as fat as Virginia, she’d kill herself. Miserable and desperate for things to change, Virginia decides to put herself on a diet. Her parents encourage her, and her mother even takes her to the doctor to see if he has any suggestions. Then one day, her parents get a phone call from her brother Byron’s university and everything starts to change.

Body issues are the focus of The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things, although it is fairly complex with sub-plots and a wide variety of characters.  I thought the characterisation was great and the plot was really well done. I could relate to Virginia’s social anxiety, especially the hiding in the loos part, I used to do the same thing when I didn’t have anyone to sit with at lunch or was just feeling especially anxious around people. I thought it was interesting to see a teenage character stand up to parents who don’t appreciate or believe in her. I’d have liked a little more of Froggy – but it’s good that the love interest didn’t take centre stage in Virginia’s mind. She seemed to be most influenced by the opinions of her parents and the popular Bri-girls.

I really liked the scene in which Virginia’s mother takes her to see Dr Love and whilst she keeps talking about weight and the way Virginia looks, Dr Love tells them that what is important is health – and that Virginia is probably perfectly healthy. Virginia’s mother is very superficial and I hated her! I longed to jump into the book and give her and Virginia’s father a really stern talking to. I nearly cried when Virginia described how much she longed to have a closer relationship with her brother. This book was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, and I liked that. I find it excruciatingly painful to read about bad familiess, but it keeps me reading on because I want to see their child escape them.

This is the second book I’ve read by Carolyn Mackler, the first was Love and Other Four-letter Words, and there is a cameo appearance of two characters from that book in The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of Carolyn Mackler’s novels. I don’t know whether the author names them herself or whether the titles are chosen by an editor, but they’re all really eye catching!

I loved that Virginia discovered a love of purple in the end – the best colour in the world, and if you can match your hair to your dress go for it!

The cover was discussed here at Once Upon a Bookcase.

Book Review: Second Star To The Right, by Deborah Hautzig

Second Star to the Right is a semi-autobiographical novel about a fourteen year old girl called Leslie who develops an eating disorder. She has longed to be thinner for a while but after she loses weight because of stomach flu she decides to be serious about dieting. She cuts down her breakfast, throws away her lunches and starts avoiding eating at dinner. Leslie also starts to do hundreds of sit ups every single day. She decides that when she reaches her goal weight of 105 pounds, that will be enough, and she will start eating properly again, but by the time she gets down to that weight, the eating disorder has taken hold of her mind and she doesn’t believe that she is thin enough, so she continues to eat less and less. Eventually she becomes too thin to physically function normally and her parents take her to the doctor. She is admitted to hospital, where none of the staff really know how to treat her, but after a short while there her parents find her a place in another hospital. She goes to live there and meets other girls suffering from eating disorders.

The story doesn’t really have a proper ending; Leslie has not recovered by the end of the book. This is a little frustrating but there is an afterword in the edition of the book that I read in which the author explains that the story was partly autobiographical and that she did not start to recover from her own eating disorder until several years after she finished writing it.

I think that the biggest flaw with Second Star To The Right is how dated it feels. The style seems old-fashioned; I don’t think most teenagers talk as Leslie does anymore. Also, nobody in the book knows very much about eating disorders, they’re a new discovery to even the medical world, whereas nowadays teenagers and parents are more likely to have heard of them.

I thought what is really interesting about Second Star To The Right is that Leslie’s eating disorder is tied up with other identity issues. She keeps saying that she isn’t sure whether when she does things that please her and please her mother, if she really did them for herself or for her mother (I realise that's a really garbled sentence - read it aloud if it's confusing you! I really struggled to summarise there). She feels like her mother’s enjoyment and pride takes something away from herself. It was really odd, but it suggested to me that perhaps Leslie’s eating disorder had something to do with trying to see herself as a separate individual who could make her own decisions. At the same time, Leslie repeatedly references Peter Pan (which is where the title of the book comes from – the directions to Never Never Land), which is, of course, about a boy who never wants to grow up, though she identifies as Wendy, who becomes a mother figure in the story. Leslie’s middle name is Margolee, after a relative who died during the Holocaust, and she keeps wondering how she as a person is linked with this woman she never met. It’s all really weird, and these ideas are only ever half-formed in Leslie’s mind so it’s difficult to draw any conclusions about what they have to do with Leslie’s anorexia.

I would say that Second Star To The Right was the most ‘issue-led’ out of all the books that I have read for Body Image and Self-Perception month. It’s a story about the progression of one girl’s eating disorder, possibly also about her relationship with her mother, but that’s not really directly addressed. There aren’t subplots or romantic intrigues or family dramas – this is about a character whose entire life has been taken over by the eating disorder. It didn’t take me very long to read Second Star To The Right, it’s quite a short book, but I think that it’s not the kind of book I would read for entertainment, it’s one to read to be informed about the subject.