Everyone knows the name "Carrie Bradshaw" - the iconic New Yorker with a passion for fashion, shoes and big curly blonde hair. Notoriously played by Sarah Jessica Parker during my late teenage years, I have to confess that whilst I watched the popular TV series on Channel 4 in the early 2000's, I was never a big fan.
Nevertheless, since I heard at The Carrie Diaries TV series, there has been a bit of intrigue which inevitably drew me towards the books, since it seems unlikely that I will ever get to watch the show. And so, I picked up the book on my Kindle and I have to say that I loved it.
Carrie is without doubt an interesting character, especially as a writer. In fact, despite obvious differences (she's blonde, pretty and good with fashion - of which I am none!), I found it easy to relate to a young Carrie Bradshaw. Okay, so quite often I really wanted to slap her for being so stupid - especially when it came to the ridiculously irritating Sebastian Kydd - but then, it's easy to slip back into that mentality of being that age, when you'd do anything to hold onto that belief that someone loved you, even when they so obviously don't.
The supporting cast was nicely realistic - although some were a little cliche (of course Walt was going to be gay, of course Sebastian was going to be a two-timing jerk and of course we have the smart girl best friend who gets the perfect boyfriend and is unquestionably Asian!) - and I liked that despite her future in Sex and the City, Carrie's Senior Year at High School was not all about sex and losing her virginity, because it was more the inner workings of her head that led us through this book, as she analysed events and evidently used them to mature as a writer.
I know that a few people have not been huge fans of this book, because they missed Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte, but whilst I'm looking forward to hopefully meeting those well-known characters in the next book, I actually thought it was quite nice to see what kind of people she was friends with in High School - I just find it sad that we'll probably never really find out what happened to them after Graduation.
Personally, I think that my love for this book was probably a little down to the fact that I'm not an enormous fan of the TV series, so I don't feel particularly attached to the characters who aren't in this one. But, as my first book from Candace Bushnell, she has certainly impressed me as a writer. During the book, Carrie's friend from Brown; George, tells her to write about what she knows, and you can tell that Bushnell is doing just that. It's so easy to imagine that she was a lot like Carrie when she was younger - and even if she wasn't exactly like that, Bushnell has done an incredible job at convincing me that it was - that's a hard task for any writer to achieve.
Buy The Carrie Diaries (The Carrie Diaries, Book 1) for Kindle
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