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Fiction. Literature. Humor (Fiction.) HTML: Now a major motion picture starring Beanie Feldstein! The 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. She will save her poverty-stricken Bohemian family by becoming a writer�??like Jo in Little Women, or the Bröntes�??but without the dying young bit. By sixteen, she's smoking cigarettes, getting drunk and working for a music paper. She's writing pornographic letters to rock-stars, having all the kinds of sex with all kinds of men, and eviscerating bands in reviews of 600 words or less. But what happens when Johanna realizes she's built Dolly with a fatal flaw? Is a box full of records, a wall full of posters, and a head full of paperbacks, enough to build a girl after all? Imagine The Bell Jar written by Rizzo from Grease. How to Build a Girl is a funny, poignant, and heartbreakingly evocative story of self-discovery and invention, as only Caitlin Moran could… (more)
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This was delightful. Johanna Morrigan is living in poverty with an alcoholic father and a depressed mother and four brothers. She does not like her options and is afraid that she has said something that might get her dad's disability benefits taken away from him. So, she decides to rebuild herself - I mean, how hard can it be? She is smart and resourceful and willing to be bold. And she does, becoming Dolly Wilde and getting herself hired as a music critic, but still, she's only sixteen. She makes mistakes, but she is irrepressible and I admire her so much even though parts of her story broke my heart.
“You go out into your world, and try and find the things that will be useful to you. Your weapons. Your tools. Your charms. You find a record, or a poem, or a picture of a girl that you pin to the wall and go, 'Her. I'll try and be her. I'll try and be her - but here.' You observe the way others walk, and talk, and you steal little bits of them - you collage yourself out of whatever you can get your hands on. You are like the robot Johnny 5 in Short Circuit, crying, 'More input! More input for Johnny 5!' as you rifle through books and watch films and sit in front of the television, trying to guess which of these things that you are watching - Alexis Carrington Colby walking down a marble staircase; Anne of Green Gables holding her shoddy suitcase; Cathy wailing on the moors; Courtney Love wailing in her petticoat; Dorothy Parker gunning people down; Grace Jones singing 'Slave to the Rhythm' - you will need when you get out there. What will be useful. What will be, eventually, you? And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone.”
This book is laugh out loud funny. Seriously, pee your pants funny. And you will find yourself cheering for Johanna while begging her to please, be just a bit more careful. And don't let the teenage protagonist fool you - this is a book with adult themes and definitely not for the prudish. There is a large dose of masturbation and sex, and humor throughout that will have you laughing at completely inappropriate things. It is a slightly painful but utterly charming journey that has left me completely satisfied and wanting to read it all over again already. Highly recommended, and if you do audiobooks, then go that route, as I just cannot praise the narration skills of Louise Brealey highly enough.
Johanna desperately wants out of Wolverhampton and dreams of a fabulous life in London, although it's clear to her that Johanna Morrigan, badly dressed, fat and prone to saying the wrong thing, would not be a success in London. So she reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde and finds that when she's pretending to be Dolly, all the outrageous, witty things that Johanna would never remember to say leap immediately to her tongue. Dolly knows how to be scandalous, how to be confident in a room full of purposeful strangers and how to make herself memorable. Dolly's not always particularly nice, but she isn't hiding under her bed talking to her dog. Johanna talks in a Scooby-Doo voice when nervous; Dolly plonks down a bottle of booze on the conference room table and polishes her reputation as a lady sex adventurer. Pulling the two parts of herself together and finding out what she really wants while saving her family might be a little harder.
How to Build a Girl is very funny. If you've liked Moran's essays, you'll like her first novel.
Caitlin Moran’s writing is full of zest, almost tiringly irrepressible, but always with a hint of insight to justify the excess. You can’t help but feel bound to Johanna’s quest for whatever it is she is really seeking — and even she may not be fully aware what that is until the end. But even when her choices are bad choices, they are undoubtedly hers; she owns them. Fortunately, you can have some hope that she has the inner resources, either wit or waggery, to face down her mistakes and rebuild if her first efforts at girl building go awry.
Be prepared for some frank eye-opening and a fair number of laughs. Gently recommended to fourteen year olds and others in need of inspired reconstructive self-surgery.
This one really didn't work for me. I was so heartbroken by the way the main character saw the world. She thought the only way
She is also obsessed with the idea of sex and losing her virginity, and begins to work hard at resolving this situation.
She builds herself, then rebuilds herself, and rebuilds again.
Johanna lives at home with her dysfunctional parents and siblings. Her father is an alcoholic dreamer who supports his family on government assistance while he drunkenly awaits his big break into music. Her mother appears to have given up on life, suffering from post-partum depression after the unexpected birth of twins. And she finds herself at an awkward stage with her brother Krissi, where he is pulling away into adulthood (and away from her oafish behavior), and Johanna finds she misses him.
The story starts when Johanna is fourteen, but fairly quickly it jumps a few years to Johanna at seventeen as her recreated self Dolly Wilde. I appreciated the idea of recreating yourself in this image of who you wish to be-- especially for a young person who hates themselves.
However this book felt annoyingly juvenile at times. It was a little too "YA" for my taste. I found myself being simultaneously amused and somewhat bored by both the characters and the story. When trying to put my finger on the the feeling, I thought, "It feels like laying around in a hammock on the weekend, bored with nothing better to do, and watching a bunch of pre-adolescent kids being obnoxious and entertaining themselves. If there were something better to do, I'd get up and leave."
The story was very crass and childish. I'm not saying that it was "offensive", as I'm not easily offended, and I in fact love a little crudity in my characters. However this story was just crass and juvenile, and I found myself mentally shaking my head as I would if this girl were talking to me in person, wishing she would mature, because despite her embellished accomplishments, she was very immature. Perhaps that is part of the problem for me. My mother always told me that I was "born to be 40" when I was a kid. I was always mature for my age. So while I "get" aspects of this novel and can see my juvenile-self in certain moments, overall I was never this immature and couldn't identify with much of it.
But I do issue a heavy warning to those who are easily offended. The book is full of vulgarity, distasteful references, coarse behavior, and sexual situations. So tread carefully.
This book actually consisted of some decent writing which had the ability to move the story along at a steady pace. And it was a peculiar story, which gave it a little interest, but I found it essentially lifeless. It was just "okay" for me-- a momentary distraction that I will quickly forget.
I was interested in Johanna the budding READER and SCHOLAR far more than the potential of J. the frustrated masturbator. Were these (reader and scholar) discarded pieces of self? Apart from one tear through Adrian Mole (more of a pun, given the circumstances, than a return to avid reading), Johanna goes from reading everything she can get her hands on to reading lousy music fanzines exclusively. Is this a good choice for a writer?
The construction of the novel is sloppy, and the book seems to be painstakingly and repetitively illustrating one truth (Johanna is leaving behind the best of herself in making Dolly, and making Dolly to fit male standards at that) but ends up asserting something else altogether (Dolly is okay, and contains pieces of Johanna's eventual adult self, but really should be a more polite writer). Unless Johanna is a serious masochist (and we spent a whole chapter finding out otherwise) her commitment to continue "having sex with lots of people" should follow more than one depiction of fictional sex that the poor girl actually enjoyed. The question of birth control is left out of the novel entirely. Is it science fiction?
I agree with other reviewers who say that Moran just tried to do too much in too few pages. A sexual journey, a musical journey, a journey to a positive body image, a fight with siblings out of poverty, a feminist awakening, a discovery of what real love is all about--every one of these themes was seriously shortchanged.
Having read her earlier How To Be A Woman and Morantology, I think I'm done here. She can't outrage and surprise me much more, except when she grows up: "Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas. Cynicism means you presume everything will end in disappointment. Cynicism is ultimately fear." But don't bring this book home unless you've already shocked and horrified your own family.
I appreciated Johanna's self-discovery, because it felt honest and true. I admired the way she dove into her dreams full-force, and never apologized for who she was. Even her mistakes just served to help her realize what she really wanted out of life, and helped her to know exactly who she wanted to BE to get there.
OMG line in book page 114 as quoted by Joanna's mother because Joanna was being dramatic about her job. "Maybe you could work in Argos as a prostitute." "They could list you in the catalog, and people could queue up and wait for you to come down the conveyor belt."
"Because my biggest secret-the one I would rather die than tell, the one I
Cut me right to the center of my 14 year-old self why don't you?! The writing was sassy, witty, and truthful and I really believed I was in for a really fun and simultaneously emotional read.
But at a certain point, the story just got a little too unbelievable for me. Normally I'm alright with far-fetched scenarios. It is fiction after all. In this instance, however, to have it start as something so real and relatable and then morph into something completely UNrelatable was a little jarring. I felt like we barely got to know Johanna before she morphed into something else, and sadly I don't feel like we saw a lot of development from her despite this seeming, at first, like a coming of age sort of story. I thought some of this was purposefully too coarse and was trying too hard to play on the shock factor.
On a whole, it was still pretty enjoyable. I really like Moran's sense of humor and am a lot more interested in trying out her non-fiction.
I actually found myself laughing out loud at parts in this book that are entirely too improper to repeat here, although it’s fair to say that masturbation comes into play a lot. Johanna’s mission in life is to reinvent herself from an overweight, kissless virgin into a too-cool-for-school hipster. She writes under the name of Dolly Wilde and poses as a hard drinking wise-cracker. Yet this book also had the ability to tug a little on the heartstrings. Her eccentric family was well developed and came across as real. This was a family that cared about each other.
Although the author clearly states that this is a novel, I am led to believe that there are many similarities to her own life experiences. Whatever the case, How To Build A Girl was an engaging coming-of-age read that I thoroughly enjoyed.
I liked a lot about the book, the music mentioned, the attitude towards sex, and the overall coming of age story, but it felt unrealistic coming from a teenager perspective and that is because it isn’t. There are times in the story where Dolly/Johanna explain something and then mention how she sees it in hindsight, yet that isn’t part of the story. We are led to believe the perspective is being told by Johanna at the time it happens. So this just irritated me a bit. My second issue the absurd ideas Johanna has about her self and her role in sex. I get it can take people awhile to figure this out, but Caitlin went to the extreme. Everything else I loved, I laughed out loud at many parts. The plot has a good flow to it and it;s even though this is an extreme version of finding yourself it is relatable.