The Notebook Girls

by Julia Baskin, Lindsey Newman, Sophie Pollitt-Cohen, Courtney Toombs

Overview

Everyone likes to think they started the notebook. Sophie claims she stole the idea from two girls in her math class. Courtney still has a death grip on the theory that the notebook was her invention. Lindsey doesn't really care; she's just along for the ride. And Julia never knows what's going on anyway.What we do know is that we started the notebook in freshman year at Stuyvesant High School as a way to keep in contact when our conflicting schedules denied us one another's company. It allowed us to express ourselves and our views of the world in a tone of complete sarcasm, obscenity, and blind honesty. We've spent a significant portion of our adolescence trying to figure out who we are. The notebook is the closest we've come.We're just a group of normal girls with normal lives. Our notebook is meant to make you laugh and make you remember.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780446550321
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	11/15/2008
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	56 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

Editorial Reviews

Most of the time, the girls seem as if they're on a race to see who can get to "grown-up" first. Maybe that's why these silly, prototypically teenage moments are so affecting.
— The Washington Post

Suzanne D'Amato

It is unusual to give a rave review to a book with no discernable plot and riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, but this one is a rather unusual book. When Sophie, Courtney, Julia, and Lindsey begin freshman year at New York City's prestigious Stuyvesant High School in 2001, they decide to create a shared diary to chronicle the ups and downs of their daily lives. Over several years, their notebook records gossip, dating, fighting, sex, experiments with drugs and alcohol, and their struggles with religion and sexuality. The notebook is presented as a facsimile of the original, containing the girls' own handwriting, photos, and doodling on each page. Their lives do not contain many of the dramatic issues often chronicled in young adult novels, such as pregnancy, violence, or addiction. Nevertheless it is a true and very humorous account of what is really happening in the lives of "good kids." Teenage girls will love the realistic portrayal of the problems that they are facing, as well as the voyeuristic look into the lives of other girls. In no way does the book moralize or present dire consequences to the girls' actions, which might, along with some graphic language and artwork, trouble some parents. Both parents and educators of teenage girls, though, will want to read it to have a better understanding of what their girls are thinking and saying to one another privately. The notebook is highly recommended for all young adult collections. VOYA CODES: 5Q 5P J S A/YA (Hard to imagine it being any better written; Every YA (who reads) was dying to read it yesterday; Junior High, defined as grades 7 to 9; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12; Adult-marketed book recommended forYoung Adults). 2006, Warner, 352p., Ages 12 to Adult.
—Stephanie Petruso

VOYA

Adult/High School-In 2002, during the second half of their freshman year at Manhattan's Stuyvesant High School, four girls began to keep a shared notebook that served as a joint diary and a compendium of letters to one another. Edited only by the authors during the writing and initial reading process, the volume serves as a front-row seat on those aspects of the teens' lives that they deemed interesting or important enough to record. The reproduction of the notebook maintains their handwriting as well as photocopies of the snapshots, sketches, and occasional wrappers and other realia they inserted into its pages. Stuyvesant High is a public exam school, and these girls are brainy, well-educated, and conscious of class. Across the years-the notebook ends midway through their junior year-they show themselves to be self-centered, bold, and whiny by turns, as well as insightful, playful, and in possession of the other hallmark moods one expects from contemporary teenage girls in middle-class America. Their behaviors may seem extreme in some parts of the country while equally expected in others: they drink, engage in sex with varying degrees of protection, explore illicit drugs, procrastinate about homework, and are generally free of politically correct speech about any group-whether "other" or themselves. Their willingness to expose their adolescence to readers makes their story, or combined stories, engrossing. Readers who like Ann Brashares's fiction may also line up to explore the gritty reality presented here.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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