While caring for a very sick relative (and dealing with all the stress that goes along with such a task), I wanted something fun and silly and light-hearted to read to leaven the seriousness of my ongoing work. I recalled seeing Louise Rennison's books back when I worked in a book store, and thought I'd track down the first in her series for my ereader. Well, that was not possible, since the publisher has decided to make only the third book (this one) and subsequent books available electronically. What's up with that? But none the less, I jumped in with this one even though I haven't read the first two.
After finishing this book, I'm not sure I need to have read the first two to get what's going on here. This is exactly what I was looking for: silly, light-hearted, and fun. The book, like all the books in the series, I presume, follows either the journal or the internal monologue (not quite sure which) of English teen Georgia Nicholson. Rennison captures the spastic, creative, unfocused inner monologue of a teen girl with eerie accuracy. I mean, no one should be surprised by this, since presumably Rennison was once a teen girl herself. I love the fact that the author didn't try to polish up the inner life of a teen-age girl. She told it true. So excellent.
Not as likeable was Georgia's selfishness. She's a funny character, but she's also a bit of a prick to her friend Jas. Jas seemed to be the only level-headed person in the entire ensemble of characters, yet Georgia frequently derided her and sometimes felt rather abusive in her approach to Jas. Too bad. It would have been easier to like Georgia if she would lay off her poor, sensible friend once in a while.
Nor did I like the abruptness of the ending. Even considering that this is a series, the end of the book seemed to fall out of the sky and thud on the ground, with not even a few sentences to wrap it up and prepare us for what may come in the next installment. I also disliked the constant use of timestamps. That made it hard to tell whether I was experiencing the thoughts of Georgia or some kind of diary. I really had no idea, and the timestamps quickly became a tired gimmick that I just skipped over in favor of reading the text.
All in all, it was a fun book and it did the job I needed it to do. I may pick up another, but if you're looking for anything other than simple, silly fun (good plot; deep, likeable characters) there are loads of other YA novels that will do that particular job much better.
Bonus information: My sister's name is Georgia and my (real) name is Libbie (Libby). This is the first time I've encountered two sisters with our names in fiction. Spooky.