Pretty Little Dirty
by Amanda Boyden
List Price: $13.95
Summary:
A coming-of-age story that depicts the pressures and inner turmoil of being a teenage girl and the intensity of life as a teenage. Inventively told, we watch as two girlfriends enter the a world '80s punk rock, sex and drugs, and violence all in the name of becoming an adult.
Other Reviewers Take:
Booklist Review: "This is the fictional equivalent of the highlight reel from the Girls Gone Wild videos....All the debauchery feels a bit forced, but the girls' intense, symbiotic bond is drawn with precision."
Kirkus Reviews: "A coming-of-age story that never quite comes into its own....Page by page, an evocative collection of scenes, but taken as a whole, a frustratingly incomplete work."
San Francisco Chronicle: "[A] great beach read for an 18-year-old who cares more about sunscreen than Daniel Defoe....Boyden is poetic with her prose, without being purple, and her short sentences read like stab wounds, puncturing opportunities for pretense."
My Review: Ouch, those other reviewer were probably never adolescent girls... Did they ever know any teenage girls?
Remember those years of faux adulthood, where EVERYTHING was so intense, where you wanted to TRY and DO EVERYTHING and ANYTHING just to to see if you can be an adult?Friendships were intense and raw and felt soooo important--this novel gets the complexity of friendships among coming-of age women right on--and not from a moralistic high horse--but with a direct, unflinching voice--which is so rare in fiction. I really liked this book.
4 comments:
How does this book compare to the movie "Thirteen?" It's interesting to contrast coming-of-age books and movies with each other to see how gauge the experiences of different teens.
The book summary scares me...I don't think I'm ready to relive my memories by proxy of these two teenagers. Maybe in year or two.
So many movies and books nowadays are exploring the zeitgeist that is the teenage girl. "Thirteen" comes to mind. These titles prove that the teenage voice is strong and should be listened to.
wtf henry - who uses the word ZEITGEIST in a blog comment?...oh that's right.. my brother does :)
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