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You are here: Home / Archives for British

British

Book Review: Diary of a Crush: French Kiss, by Sarra Manning

25th May 2013 By Julianne Leave a Comment

Edie Wheeler has just moved to Manchester with her parents and cat and is starting college for the first time. Everyone else there seems to know each other and she feels left out of everything. Spotting Dylan, a gorgeous art student, the boy of her dreams, only seems to make things worse as she feels sure she’ll never get to know him. Frustrated with her lack of friends, Edie signs up for a photography class, where she is forced to work with Dylan, but she can barely speak in his presence and she doesn’t have any good ideas. Dylan and his friend Shona just seem so much cooler than Edie could ever be. Then she starts talking to Mia, who is dating Dylan’s friend Paul. It’s a relief to finally have a friend, but Mia isn’t at all helpful when it comes to her crush and when Dylan kisses Edie, then ignores her afterwards, she doesn’t know what to do.

I’ve read this book so many times before that I’ve lost count, but when I received a copy of the cute new edition published by Atom Books I decided to read it and see how it holds up. I still found Edie to be a witty and engaging diarist. I like how she doesn’t shy away from sharing the embarrassing things she does, and how self aware she is after she does something silly like throw a stereotypical teenage strop. Although she begins the diary as a nervous, self-conscious narrator, she stands up for herself when she needs to, even if it takes a long time for her to build up her resolve sometimes.

Of course I loved Dylan, as usual, but this time around he seemed more awkward, which actually made him more endearing in a strange kind of way. Edie knows what she wants, it’s Dylan who is confused and flighty, and both of them act like inconsiderate fools when they’re in the mood. I also still loved all the other characters – Shona still seems like a paragon of hipness, Nat and Trent are adorable (I always miss them in the following books, where they fade into the background). Josh, Edie’s Dylan-substitute-boyfriend is endearingly deluded – I just wanted to take the poor boy aside and tell him to lavish his affections somewhere else. Villianous Mia’s personal delusions are not so sweet, but I do feel sorry for her, and suspect that she wouldn’t be playing games for attention if she had any friends.

The story is very fast paced, because Edie only writes when something has happened or to complain when something’s on her mind. There are only 205 pages, and there is so much friendship and relationship drama in the first half of the novel that the pages fly by, and before long I was on the ferry with Edie, on the way to Paris for the photography trip!

Having read a previous edition, I was interested to see what changes would be made. Apart from the inclusion of an author’s afterword, all of them are quite superficial – cultural references updated, sentences cut to improve the flow of the text – but it was quite weird to me to imagine Edie and Dylan walking around in 2013! Because I’ve been reading the 2004 edition about once a year since it came out, in my head I had them frozen in that time, wearing clothes that I thought were cool when I was a teenager. Art boys were better dressed back then, I’m afraid to say. Nowadays they all seem to wear the same checked shirts and skinny jeans and beanie hats (as described at one point in the novel) – I kind of preferred them in baggier jeans!

I would recommend French Kiss to fans of books featuring moody boys, friendship drama, and amazing kissing scenes. I’ve read hundreds of books since I read this for the first time, and I still think that French Kiss has some of the best kissing scenes of all time. The Louvre. The discotheque. The hotel room…

Previously: I introduced the Diary of a Crush trilogy in my first Celebrating Series post!

Next up: I utilise my hard-earned Polyvore skills and play dress-up-Edie!

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: book review, British, Diary of a Crush, Diary of a Crush week, review, Sarra Manning, teen fiction, teenage fiction, UKYA, YA, young adult

Book Review: Adorkable, by Sarra Manning

26th July 2012 By Julianne 1 Comment

Photo by 20after4 (runner up: puck90)

Our heroine, Jeane Smith, is a seventeen-year-old borderline-professional blogger. Jeane has a fair bit in common with real-live fashion bloggers Tavi and Gala Darling, especially when it comes to the activities she gets paid for, but she’s older than Tavi and younger than Gala and she’s British. Really British. She loves all things dorky, writing very opinionated posts, eating Haribo, and watching cute videos of dogs on YouTube. Although Jeane’s career star is on the rise, her parents fund the flat she lives in and she still goes to school, where although it seems everyone follows her blog, they don’t spend any time with her outside of class. Her only friend at school is her boyfriend, Barney, though their relationship isn’t the most romantic – to say the least.

Our hero is Michael Lee, eighteen and toeing the line of conformity with his faux-hawk and Converse shoes. He’s popular and conventionally successful for a teenage boy – good at school and at sports. He lives with his parents and two little sisters and dates the popular and beautiful Scarlett. Everything changes when he starts to suspect that Barney and Scarlett might be having an affair, and decides to tell Jeane.She doesn’t believe him until Barney and Scarlett make their affections obvious and several dramas later, somehow, Jeane and Michael end up kissing. And they just can’t stay away from each other after that…

I’d been excited about this book ever since Sarra first described it, years ago, and as soon as it was announced that it would be published this year, my excitement went into overdrive. Every time I opened a jiffy bag and didn’t find my copy of Adorkable within, I was a little bit disappointed. And then, on the glorious day when it actually arrived, I squealed and did a victory dance. I’m not sure how getting a book you were expecting anyway is a victory, but yeah. It was not much like this. But it was joyful.

I had no idea until I recieved my copy that there would be two narrators. At first I was a bit disappointed, because I often find books written from alternating perspectives to be missing some magic. Either one narrator is a lot more convincing than the other, or the alternating perspective means that I can’t really get into the head of either character properly. However, neither of these issues plagued Adorkable. I liked both Jeane and Michael’s voices and I felt that it switched between them at just the right moments. I also thought that they both developed equally over the course of the novel, so it was well balanced.

I loved Jeane and Michael’s characters – neither of them are immediately nice but I thought that was realistic. Teenagers are not very nice! I was fairly nice and thoughtful for a teenager and I was still a bit of a knobhead 70% of the time. There’s no instalove in Adorkable, as they bicker and fight and bicker some more. I really liked that they were both quite arrogant characters. Jeane is a breath of fresh air in a genre filled with girls in with faltering self-esteem. Both Jeane and Michael’s families feature in the story but their influence is not overdramaticised, which I really liked. Jeane’s family history is sad but she’s not traumatised, it’s just something she has to deal with.

I also adored the secondary characters – especially Barney and Scarlett. I liked that the story was kind to Scarlett – it would have been easy for it to be mean and it wasn’t. There is also a cameo appearance from a couple of Guitar Girl characters. Complete tangent – Guitar Girl characters have cameoed in at least three other books now. When are we going to get some Diary of a Crush cameos? I know Edie or Dylan is extremely unlikely, but how about Poppy? Mellowstar are mentioned in Guitar Girl but she never appears. Or her boyfriend from Sealed With A Kiss, Jesse, because he’s hilarious. Or maybe Darby and/or Atsuko, boy-chasing? ANYWAY…

Twitter plays a pretty important role in Adorkable and I was really pleased with the way it’s presented. It’s not used in a gimmicky way at all, it’s completely realistic in my opinion, and that’s quite refreshing. There were quite a few novelty books published in the early ’00s using text messaging and/or e-mail to tell the stories and happily Adorkable is nothing like those.

Other things I loved in Adorkable include: the dialogue (I heart Sarra Manning’s dialogue, forever and ever and ever), the feminism (particularly in relation to matters of the physical nature, ahem), the descriptions of Jeane’s outfits, and Michael Lee! Although I have enjoyed every book Sarra Manning has had published, no love interest has ever matched the standards of the first. Dylan is still the original and the best fictional boyfriend, but Michael Lee isn’t a bad number two (on the Sarra Manning only list of course, on the All Books list he’s number three, behind Noel DuBoise, obviously). He’s funny and a bit conceited but also down to earth and he’s not afraid to take action. Cue girlish sigh.

It took me about six days to read Adorkable and I have to admit that at times I
was trying not to read it so fast as I didn’t want it to be over! Adorkable surpassed my hopeful expectations and is a book I’m sure I’ll read over and over again. I’ve run out of other things to say so I’ll just finish by saying: if you have the vaguest notion that you might enjoy Adorkable, buy it or borrow it, and read it ASAP!

Many thanks to Atom for sending me a review copy.




Other enthusiastic reviews for your perusal:
Readaraptor (in letter form! I love it!)
SisterSpooky
Fluttering Butterflies
So Many Books, So Little Time
Cicely Loves Books
weartheoldcoat (features some hilarious fangirling I can totally relate to)
Young Adult Anonymous

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: blogger, British, Sarra Manning, teen fiction, teenage, teenage fiction, writers I have met, YA, young adult

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Hi! I'm Julianne and this is my book blog. Click my picture to read more about me.

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