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A review by sakusha
The It-Girl by Katy Birchall
3.0
Tries too hard to be funny (like just about every sentence), but often succeeds.
Similar to the book "Big Mouth & Ugly Girl," because it's about teens who exchange e-mails. This book was published in 2015, so it seems kind of old fashioned for teens to be exchanging e-mails instead of texting. I assume even most 12 year olds have smartphones nowadays. I was using mostly instant messengers myself as a teen in the early 2000s.
May look like a long book by its page amount, but it's actually short because a lot of the book are these e-mails where you can just skip over the To/From/Subject parts that take up a lot of the pages.
Also unrealistic in that there are seemingly only 2 popular girls and 1 popular boy in the whole grade. And Anna is supposed to be a loser because she only has 2 friends, but apparently the popular ones only have 2 friends as well, so how exactly are they more popular? Actually, a few other popular kids are named much later in the story, but they're inserted like an afterthought.
Notable quote from one of Anna's e-mails:
"Dancing with a balloon is a reasonable and funny thing to do. It's what Oscar Wilde would have done. It's a scathing comment on our society of dependent and irrational figures who consider themselves incomplete without a significant other."
I liked it because: (a) it mentioned Oscar Wilde, whose play I just finished reading, and (b) because I agree completely with that last line. However, I think it's unrealistic for a 12 year old to be phrasing it quite this way. Scathing? Dependent? Irrational figures? Significant other? Those are all too big of words for a 12 year old. I was of the same opinion as a 12 year old, and I think I would've phrased it like this: "Dances are stupid. You have to pay money to be in a noisy room full of kids you can't stand, watching them pretend to like their partners who they won't even be with in a week or two." And I was more eloquent than most. Plus, why would a 12 year old even know about Oscar Wilde? I guess realism was exchanged for humor.
And by the way, despite what Anna said in the above quote, she most definitely does want to go to the dance, which disappointed me, because I would've found it more interesting to read about a girl who boycots the dance.
Similar to the book "Big Mouth & Ugly Girl," because it's about teens who exchange e-mails. This book was published in 2015, so it seems kind of old fashioned for teens to be exchanging e-mails instead of texting. I assume even most 12 year olds have smartphones nowadays. I was using mostly instant messengers myself as a teen in the early 2000s.
May look like a long book by its page amount, but it's actually short because a lot of the book are these e-mails where you can just skip over the To/From/Subject parts that take up a lot of the pages.
Also unrealistic in that there are seemingly only 2 popular girls and 1 popular boy in the whole grade. And Anna is supposed to be a loser because she only has 2 friends, but apparently the popular ones only have 2 friends as well, so how exactly are they more popular? Actually, a few other popular kids are named much later in the story, but they're inserted like an afterthought.
Notable quote from one of Anna's e-mails:
"Dancing with a balloon is a reasonable and funny thing to do. It's what Oscar Wilde would have done. It's a scathing comment on our society of dependent and irrational figures who consider themselves incomplete without a significant other."
I liked it because: (a) it mentioned Oscar Wilde, whose play I just finished reading, and (b) because I agree completely with that last line. However, I think it's unrealistic for a 12 year old to be phrasing it quite this way. Scathing? Dependent? Irrational figures? Significant other? Those are all too big of words for a 12 year old. I was of the same opinion as a 12 year old, and I think I would've phrased it like this: "Dances are stupid. You have to pay money to be in a noisy room full of kids you can't stand, watching them pretend to like their partners who they won't even be with in a week or two." And I was more eloquent than most. Plus, why would a 12 year old even know about Oscar Wilde? I guess realism was exchanged for humor.
And by the way, despite what Anna said in the above quote, she most definitely does want to go to the dance, which disappointed me, because I would've found it more interesting to read about a girl who boycots the dance.