HOW TO BUILD A GIRL BY CAITLIN MORAN
EBURY PRESS (PAPERBACK), 2014
352 PAGES
BLURB FROM THE COVER
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…
EXTRACT
I am lying in bed, next to my brother Lupin.
He is six years old. He is asleep.
I am fourteen. I am not asleep. I am masturbating.
I look at my brother and think nobly, ‘This is what he would want. He would want me to be happy’.
After all, he loves me. He wouldn’t want me to be stressed. And I love him – although I must stop thinking about him while I’m masturbating. It feels wrong. I am trying to get my freak on. I can’t have siblings wandering into my sexual hinterland. We may share a bed tonight – he left his bunk at midnight crying, and got in next to me – but we cannot share a sexual hinterland. He needs to leave my consciousness.
REVIEW
This was my first time reading Caitlin Moran.
I loved How to Build a Girl. Moran offers the perfect coming-of-age story. How to Build a Girl is funny, filthy and incredibly sad at times. I loved the character of Johanna/Dolly. She was a girl after my own heart – fat, bookish, desperate to fit in but who never quite does. The last chunk of the novel is quite emotional as Johanna realises she’s become completely lost in Dolly and that Dolly isn’t really someone she wants to be anymore. Joanna thought she was having a blast as Dolly writing for D&ME magazine and having lots of sex. However, Dolly’s only value came from being an enormous slut and someone’s bit of rough. The novel has a happy ending though without being insipid.
RATING