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:	9780446578622
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	04/13/2006
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.88(d)
Age Range:	13 - 17 Years

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

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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