How to Build a Girl
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4.3 • 106 Ratings
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Soon to be a major film directed by Coky Giedroyc and starring Ladybird's Beanie Feldstein as Johanna Morrigan and Game of Thrones's Alfie Allen as John Kite
My name’s Johanna Morrigan. I’m fourteen, and I’ve just decided to kill myself.
I don’t really want to die, of course! I just need to kill Johanna, 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…
A Number One Sunday Times bestseller in hardback and paperback, from the award-winning and Sunday Times bestselling author of How to Be a Woman.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The author of the bestselling memoir How to Be a Woman returns with a semi-autobiographical novel about Johanna Morrington: a spunky teenager growing up in a Wolverhampton council estate with her outrageous and deluded wannabe-rock-star father, long-suffering mother and four siblings. After her disastrous performance in a televised poetry competition, Johanna decides to resurrect herself as Dolly Wilde, an irreverent and rowdy music journalist named after Oscar Wilde’s “amazing alcoholic lesbian” niece. With How to Build a Girl, Caitlin Moran turns the cringe-inducing horrors of adolescence into an audaciously funny coming-of-age story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"The 1990s are a bad time to be poor and not-famous," thinks 14-year-old Johanna Morrigan, who lives with her parents and four siblings on a council estate in Wolverhampton. Arguably, the new millennium brought little relief on this front, but for Moran (How to Be a Woman), the gritty British landscape of adolescence, set to a loud '90s soundtrack of the Stone Roses and the Mondays, is the stage for Johanna's fabulous reinvention of herself. Adopting the pseudonym Dolly Wilde, Johanna educates herself in eyeliner and contemporary music and begins submitting record reviews to a London weekly. In the process, she grows up, has adventures far beyond the estate walls, and learns to love herself. Moran's sharp sense of humor comes through in Johanna's observations. Gratifying, too, are the constant stream of '90s alt-rock references (Soup Dragons, anyone?) and the portrait of a pre-Internet world, where kids actually had actually leave their houses to find new identities. Unfortunately, Johanna's voice feels forced, and her exploits seem to surpass what might have been believable chutzpah.
Customer Reviews
Not what I expectdd
Very funny and in some places very raw and real. A perfect coming of age tale that will surprise you
How to Build a Girl
I loved this book, made me laugh out loud and cringe. Dysfunctional family but fun.
Life-affirming punk prose
Whatever your age, Johanna Morrigan / Dolly Wilde will speak to you, either the you that you are now, or the you that you once were. In my case, it’s the latter. I didn’t have a dysfunctional family, but How to Build a Girl makes me wish I had. I wish I’d known at fourteen that you could just kill off the person you hated being and build someone else, the person you wanted to be. And if that didn’t work out, rip it up and start again. And keep building new ones until you found the one you wanted to keep. Good luck, Johanna / Dolly. I look forward to meeting you again soon.