Book Review -How to Build a Girl, Caitlin Moran, Harper, 2014

-

I’m going to put my hands up and confess I didn’t read this book when it first came out, due to bad reviews.  Actually, I got it from my local library - definitely saves me £££ on my reading habit! – read a few pages, put it down and forgot about it for a while.

Now I have to tell you the reason the reviews put me off.  Having read Moran’s iconic How to Be a Woman and discovering a book that was actually my bible.  Anyone who wants to understand me just has to read that book.  The reviews gave the impression that this was pretty much a fictional copy of How to Be a Woman, at first I didn’t see the point of reading what many critics had lambasted as a copy of a copy.

Curiosity got the better of me though, and I am so glad it did!  Having grown up in West Somerset, always dreaming of escaping from a small town where everyone knows your name and your business – not always a good thing – I could totally relate to Caitlin Moran’s fictionalized version of herself; Johanna Morrigan who lives on a council estate in Wolverhampton, loves music, and dreams of city life.

Moran writes with humour, about Johanna’s attempt to reinvent herself as Dolly Wilde, music journalist and ‘Lady sex adventurer.’  This is a coming of age book, and I love how issues which are often taboo, such as female masturbation – women do it as well as men.  Get over it world – are written about with gusto.  More serious issues are embraced too such as living on a low income, the class divide, and female equality – the belief that promiscuous men are glorified, yet women who embrace their sexuality are vilified.

Once I had rediscovered How to Build a Girl, I couldn’t get enough of this book.  Would suit Caitlin Moran fans, if you’ve read How to Be a Woman ok there are no massive shockers here, but the writing and refreshing honesty are a breath of fresh air.  Lesson learnt; don’t follow the crowd and make up your own mind – both with this book and in life!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm Not OK

-
Greetings fellow creative types!  How are you? If you're reading this you either know me personally or are lucky enough to have stumbled across the best new blog ever by pure chance. Fate, destiny, whatever. You're here. So let's get to know each other. Does that mean we have to talk about our feelings? Really hope not. Recently I've been through some major personal trauma. Hands down the worst period of my life. I've always thought of myself as a positive person who can get through anything. I've been through a lot of shit in my life(not a huge fan of swearing but sometimes there's no substitute for it. Except the C word. Not a fan of that.) I'm going to be completely honest and open with you now. If you're reading this, you are already someone I know and trust, and one thing I have learnt from this whole experience, is that through my life I have always been someone who suffers with anxiety. I have always been a worrier. When I was five I used
Read more

Guest Post: Kristina M Serrano

-
Diagnosed: My Autistic Author’s Life My name is Kristina, and I’ve always loved books. For as long as I can remember. Seriously, in my baby book, my mom recorded my first phrase as being “I want book.” I can’t remember learning how to read because I was always able to, as far as my memory can go back. And I’ve always loved writing. My first-grade teacher told me I was going to write books someday. Now, I’ve so far signed three contracts with the small Canadian publisher Sands Press for my books Slow Echoes, Gold Silence, and Sole Voices, the first three in the Post Worlds series, about an Egyptian-goddess descendant who falls in love with a boxer despite supernatural challenges prying them apart. But for a while, writing was very difficult. I’ve only recently started getting back into the habit again. Severe depression, anxiety, and OCD had been building over many years until one day I had a panic attack right in the middle of my shift as a jewelry salesperson that sent me
Read more

Me Too in 2023:

-
 I don't know about you but what a decade 2023 has been so far....the world's on the brink of war, you need a mortgage to buy a pack of butter, and to top it all off, harassment of women, both virtual and face to face, is worse than ever. I've never known anything like it. I can only speak for myself of course and truth be told, I feel a bit nervous writing about this -the original title was 'Me too in 2022' so you can only imagine how long I've been mulling it over for. I've recently read ''Sex Power Money' by Sara Pascoe - click here to check it out, and it's given me so much food for thought.  I've also recently done a course that has made me see how different growing up as a teenager in the late 90s is to teenagers who grow up now, where, particularly male behaviour, accepted back then as 'boys being 'boys and 'banter' would no way be acceptable now. Sara Pascoe puts forward what at first I found a bit of a controvers
Read more