A Peek Into the Diary of a 14 Year Old Girl.

So, on the one hand this, I think, a fairly accurate look into the brain of a 14 year old girl. But on the other, it’s the diary of a fourteen year old teenager. Which is to say that while it’s an extremely believable look into the brain of a British teenager I’m not really sure that I enjoyed that look.

Georgia Nicolson starts the book at the end of her summer holidays. She’s a fairly typical teenager and has the typical teenager problems. She and her friends are newly boy obsessed, dealing with (supposedly) unreasonable teachers, and all the other things one deals with when one is a fourteen year old girl. As we’re reading the diary thoughts of Georgia, there are some things that need to be inferred as Georgia is an unreliable narrator.  This is fine, it’s just I have no real desire to re-live my teenage years, and there wasn’t enough of a story to justify the simple day-to-day life experience that we did get. Though I loved every single mention of Angus the cat, who is awesome and I would read his diary in a heartbeat.

My problem was that nothing really happened in the book. Georgia doesn’t really learn or grow. It’s a little Bridget Jones’s Diary for teenagers, except Bridget does actually change. My other issue with the book is that the potential life-changing event that is hinted about never really happens, instead we’re left on what is essentially a cliff-hanger. This, more then anything, makes the book feel incomplete. I hate books that do this. If you’re going to tell a story, tell it completely or not at all. I have no problem with long series that have a long over-arching plot so long as each individual novel is a story within itself, and this one just didn’t have enough story to really feel complete. It makes sense, this is a slice of life novel, but I’m really just meh on the whole thing.

I think I may have really enjoyed this if I’d come across it when I was Georgia’s age, or even just a bit older, but I have little interest in it now.