"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.
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