YA New York

No, dears, that pic to the left is not a badly edited screencap. It’s a real book cover, and I have to say I adore it. Click on it to get a closer view. Yes, that’s right. You see a faux-browser there. Indeed, you see a faux-browser throughout the entire book, because the whole thing is presented in blog format.

Now, part of me is mad because I had this idea, and I was fully planning on executing it and being the very first brilliant person to do it exactly as it would appear on a screen. But another part of me is very happy, because Susie does this whole thing very well.

A few things to note: This book is written by Welsh author Susie Day, and was released in the UK as Big Woo!. So, unless you’re trying to collect ‘em all, don’t buy both and expect two different books. Anyway, since Susie is Welsh, it makes good sense that her heroine is an awesome British emo blogger named Sarah (the nick serafina, btw, comes from Philip Pullman) who gives herself 112 days to achieve happiness.

I have a theory about British chick lit, which is this: It’s funnier than American chick lit. It’s almost always funnier. This is because British folks speak differently from American folks, and if you have even the slightest weakness for British accents, you will think everything is cute and hilarious. (Fortunately, this book does actually come with a glossary of sorts, which is very short and can be read first or last, and which explains the meaning of words like “spoon,” which you might imagine would mean “an eating utensil,” but actually means “stupid person” … or “eating utensil.”)

Back to the book: It’s not only beautifully presented, but well-written, funny, and at times kind of heartbreaking. (I mean, c’mon. She’s emo! No emo kid can live life without a crisis!) All joking aside, serafina67 finds out that when you put your whole life on the internet, things can sometimes get complicated. We all know a little bit about this firsthand, yes? You posted about your secret crush, and your secret crush found your blog?

In Sarah’s — or should we say serafina’s — case, she starts out yapping pretty normally about her life, and she’s got a pretty decent blog. But then she goes and says something that a lot of people read, and then everyone stops talking to her, and, as my friend Jami B like to say, “antics ensue.” Antics, my friends, are always a good thing worthy of your attention.

Now, if you’ll pardon me, it’s Friday night, and I have to go put together this lamp contraption from IKEA. But I urge you to go out and breathe some life into our gal serafina67 by reading her blog-novel.

Buy serafina67 *urgently requires life* from Amazon.com.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.