How To Build A Girl: A Novel
by Caitlin Moran
Buy on AmazonThe New York Times bestselling author hailed as “the UK’s answer to Tina Fey, Chelsea Handler, and Lena Dunham all rolled into one” (Marie Claire) makes her fiction debut with a hilarious yet deeply moving coming of age novel. What do you do in your teenage years when you realize what your parents taught you wasn’t enough? You must go out and find books and poetry and pop songs and bad heroes—and build yourself. It’s 1990. Johanna Morrigan, fourteen, has shamed herself so badly on local TV that she decides that there’s no point in being Johanna anymore and reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde—fast-talking, hard-drinking Gothic hero and full-time Lady Sex Adventurer.…
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"Halfway through How To Build A Girl I put the book down, sighed, and wondered if I should just barrel through and finish it in one night, or savor it for another day. There’s something about Caitlin Moran’s mixture of noisy fun and social commentary that’s a very happy place for a reader to hang out. The book follows the misadventures of Johanna Morrigan — an awkward, hilarious teen who decides that the path to reinvention will entail becoming a hard-drinking, oft-sexed rock critic. Her adventures are hilarious, and oddly relatable even when they’re sitcom-zany. If anyone knows how to build a girl, it’s Moran — she’s put adolescence on the page in a book that’s humming with authenticity. You’ll wish you were besties."
NPR Books We Love — 2014 · apps.npr.org