"My name's Johanna Morrigan. I'm fourteen and I've decided to kill myself.
I don't really want to die, of course! I just need to kill the old me, and build a new girl. Dolly Wilde will be everything I want to be, and more! But as with all the best coming of age stories, it doesn't exactly go to plan..."
In How to Build a Girl, Caitlin Moran has created one of the funniest, most genuine and vivid characters I've read in a long time. Johanna Morrigan is witty, insecure and delightfully crass. Her story, that of a day-dreaming young girl growing up poor in 1990's Wolverhampton who aspires to music journalism fame by reinventing herself as 'Dolly Wilde' after a disaster on live TV is charming and incredibly relatable. Johanna goes through the things nearly every young adult experiences: first loves, feeling left out, identity crises, and dreaming about adulthood. But her story is a lot more crude and a lot funnier than most.
Her family is hysterical, realistically flawed and I just loved Krissi, her older brother's dialogue.
It’s also hard for me to be critical when Moran describes so well the sensation of being poor. I’ve been lucky enough to live above the poverty line my entire life. It’s useful for us to try to understand, then, that when one loses income, whether it’s a job or benefits, for some families the solution is not as simple as “cutting back.” Extreme poverty brings its own set of challenges, such as not being able to make healthy meals.
I do think that's one point Moran is trying to get at with this novel; that everything seems worse in the moment, and if/when you take a step back, especially once you're older & wiser, you'll be able to see things as they really were—a.k.a. not that bad. But the journey we go on in this story, at Johanna's expense, is riotously wacky and highly enjoyable.
However I found the vulgarity and bad language a little overwhelming at times. I was expecting a pretty PG teen novel but got something very different so read with caution. The angst and almost self-destructive behaviours are vividly conveyed. I was also shocked that this was all happening to a girl of my own age which I found slightly unbelievable. Don't read it though if you're sensitive to swearing, sex, drugs and alcohol!!
Age Rating 15/16 +. Crass, vulgar, bad language.
"Only a week after losing his wife, a distraught Detective Kimmo Joentaa returns to work to join a murder inquiry. It is the case of a woman smothered in her sleep—a curiously tranquil death, it seems, and one with no motive—and Kimmo becomes obsessed. The only clues are a half-empty bottle of red wine, two glasses, and a missing painting, a blurred landscape of no value. When a young man is found murdered in bed the next day in a hostel room with seven people asleep around him, Kimmo realizes a serial killer must be at work. As he struggles with the memory of his wife’s early death, Kimmo investigates the murders and tries to understand the mind of the perpetrator, who appears to be quiet, self-effacing, and affable—why then the urge to destroy? Set in Finland during the unnervingly long days of late summer near the top of the world, Ice Moon is an unsettling, poignant mystery."
Whilst there is murder, and an obviously very disturbed serial killer, in many ways ICE MOON is more an exploration of grief. The book opens with Finnish detective Kimmo Joentaa confronted with the death of his young wife from cancer. Returning to work straight away, he is left trying to understand and deal with her death, whilst a strange series of connected killings begin to occur involving a range of seemingly unconnected victims.
During his period of grief a serial murderer is killing people in their sleep by placing a pillow over their faces while they sleep until they die. As Kimmo sees the bodies of those who have been murdered while they sleep - he has thoughts and associations of Sanna, his wife. The story goes back and forth between Kimmo, and the thoughts of the murderer. The murderer who also has a very deep dissociation in his thoughts of life around him which leads to an interesting sympathy and understanding between them.
Whilst the crime investigation proceeds through the book, the focus of ICE MOON remains Kimmo's struggle with grief, the affect that it has on his decision making, his life and his work. Ultimately it's that overwhelming sense of his own grief, disbelief and detachment which tempers and informs the entire book - it's significantly less about the crime and more an exploration of this one man's experience of death.
This was undoubtedly a moving book. The crime was handled well, but what you come away from is the awfulness of loss, and Kimmo's tentative steps back into his life.
Age Rating 13+. Nothing untoward and the murders are not brutal or described.
