“How to Build a Girl” is Caitlin Moran’s first novel for adults. If you’ve read her books “How to be a Woman” or “Moranthology” you probably know whether you’ll like this or not. If you haven’t read her thoughts before, this is could be a good book for anyone who grew up in the 1990s, especially if you were a teenage girl who spent hours in her room listening to The Happy Mondays or The Smashing Pumpkins. Be warned! As Moran says in her acknowledgements, “I’ve written *another* book full of wanking and shagging.”
I’m liking
I enjoyed this story. A lot of the music was familiar to me (yes, I spent a lot of time in my room in the 1990s, listening to shoegazing music) and I enjoyed Johanna’s experiences as a newly employed person, finding out that her job would actually get her CDs for free, so she didn’t have to request them from the library!
Caitlin Moran managed to describe the life of a poor family in Wolverhampton without making them into saints or bludgers. She also showed the desperation of Johanna’s parents trying to stretch the budget while also giving Johanna her independence.
The story was serious but also funny, which is a good combination in my books!
Things that made me go hmmmm
I felt that Caitlin Moran had a point to make and I wasn’t sure that a novel was the best way to make it. I think she was trying to write both a funny and moving story about growing up poor in Britain in the 1990s, and a book about becoming a woman and about women’s identity and sexual independence. I wasn’t quite sure if her audience was people who grew up in the 1990s, or young women. The narrator’s voice also seemed not quite sure if it was Johanna as she was growing up and living through her experiences, or Johanna looking back.
I also couldn’t help but notice that even though Caitlin Moran says “This is a novel and it is all fictitious” that some of the story sounded remarkably like her stories about herself from Moranthology. That did make me wonder how much of the rest of it was her real-life experience.
The conclusion
I enjoyed this book, but it did feel a little bit uneven. I think Caitlin Moran’s second novel will be better.
I’d recommend this book to people who grew up in the 1990s and enjoy Caitlin Moran’s work. I wouldn’t give it to a teenage girl unless I had checked with the parents first! Other books by Caitlin Moran could be suitable.
