Black Rabbit Ink

Quote of the Week

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs."

Stephen King

Bookshelf Review: Undiscovered Gyrl

Title: Undiscovered Gyrl 

Author: Allison Burnett

From the back cover:

Only on the internet can you have so many friends and be so lonely.

Beautiful, wild, funny, and lost, Katie Kampenfelt is taking a year off before college to find her passion. Ambitious in her own way, Katie intends to do more than just smoke weed with her boyfriend, Rory, and work at the bookstore. She plans to seduce Dan, a thirty-two-year-old film professor.

Katie chronicles her adventures in an anonymous blog, telling strangers her innermost desires, shames, and thrills. But when Dan stops taking her calls, when her alcoholic father suffers a terrible fall, and when she finds herself drawn into a dangerous new relationship, Katie's fearless narrative begins to crack, and dark pieces of her past emerge.

Sexually frank, often heartbreaking, and bursting with devilish humor, Undiscovered Gyrl is an extraordinarily accomplished novel of identity, voyeurism, and deceit. 

Review:

Katie Kampenfelt is a character I just could not enjoy. She acts on impulse and regrets it later, but doesn’t really learn from her mistakes. She is overly cynical. She runs blindly down a straight path to self destruction. And her narration makes it hard to care about her or the people around her.

Let me pause here, though, to remind everyone that I am a 30+ year old mother. I am not this book’s target audience. Usually, this doesn’t deter from my enjoyment of YA novels, but in this case, yeah, I really think it made a difference.

My biggest caveat with the novel is that Katie’s bad girl in limbo is never really redeemed. Instead, she falls farther and farther into darkness, continuing to make bad choices and trust the wrong people.

There are several references to drugs, alcohol, and sex which, mostly, didn’t bother me. Some of Katie’s adventures, though, include hooking up with much older men, portions of which were a bit uncomfortable to read and left me with an eww…icky feeling.

The ending is an abrupt one that spins the story in a different direction - a good and bad way to end. Loose ends are hastily tied up, but several new questions unravel everything. It is dramatic and does provide an unexpected twist to the story, but mostly it left me feeling a bit cheated. A few more details regarding what happens to Katie, and why, would have made me a much more satisfied reader.

Blog entries are fresh way to tell the story and give Katie’s life a raw, undefined edginess. They also make this a quick read, especially for readers that devour dozens of blog posts each day. And the promotional campaign – geared toward internet savvy readers familiar with Facebook,  MySpace, You Tube, and Flickr – is a unique approach that lends a touch of realness to Katie’s story.

However, a slick format and extensive promotional campaign does not change the fact that I didn’t have a lot to take away from this book. Which is disappointing, because I really wanted to like it.

Undiscovered Gyrl will be in book stores August 11, 2009.

More Uncommon Goods Finds

Oh boy - Uncommon Goods is awesome! Look what else I found:

Writer No Evil Pewter Pens and Holders

Plan B Pencil Pot

Great Authors Pot Belly Figures (Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Shakespeare)

James the Bookend Bookends

Booky Little Birdhouses

How cool are these?

Birdhouses made out of classic novels like Tom Sawyer, Wizard of OZ, Winnie the Pooh, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

These unique works of art are created by Dave Vissat for Uncommon Goods. They are kind of pricey ($120 - yikes!) but boy, I would like to have one. They are just too cute!

Quote of the Week

"The world is a great book, he who never stirs from home, reads only a page."

St. Augustine