Author: Louise Rennison
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: worthy
How can I not love a novel set in Yorkshire? Both my parents were born and raised in Yorkshire, and I've visited many times myself. York is one of my favorite cities: Alas poor York, I knew it Horatio, a city of infinite joy! I'm well acquainted wi't dialect tha' knaws, so it were bloomin' wonderful to read it 'ere. So how can I not love this? Discuss!
This review is actually part of a triple that I'm going for, featuring the original that inspired this one: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, and another derivation, amusingly titled Wuthering High by Cara Lockwood. This is the only one of the three I found to be a worthy read.
If you're really in love with the author's Georgia Nicholson series, you'll feel very much at home here, because this series is the same - I mean almost exactly the same with only the circumstances and the names changed. The main character Tallulah replaces Georgia, and is in fact, we learn, Georgia's cousin. Georgia's friends from that series are replaced with similar and quirky friends for Tallulah. Georgia's love interest, Robbie is replaced with Tallulah's love interest Alex. Georgia's kid sister, Libby is replaced with Alex's young sister, Ruby. Georgia's feisty cat, Angus, is replaced here with the feisty owl.
The jokes and attempts at humor are pretty much all recycled from the other series, too, but there is some more variety here and some new and amusing material. In some parts, this novel is very good and highly amusing, but too much of it induces a need to groan, and not in a good way. There's far too much focus - again - in this series on snogging and "corkers" (Tallulah's replacement term for "basoomers" - breasts - used in the Georgia series).
It's like Rennison simply took a template of her original series, and went through it making a wholesale replacement of names and situations to create this series, which is fine if you can get away with it. I guess ripping-off yourself is morally an improvement over ripping off others, which all-too-many YA authors are doing these days, with the endless Hunger Games rip-offs and boiler-plate dystopian knock-offs told from female first person PoV. At least this is amusing - assuming you go for Rennison's sense of humor. I get the impression that she amuses herself more than she does her readers.
However, having said all that, I did find the story to be sufficiently entertaining that I am willing to recommend it with the above caveats in mind. It was just original enough to paper over the déjà vu I felt in reading this one. One thing which helped was the bizarre expressions of surprise which Tallulah ejaculates randomly. Those, to me, were really funny, but then I'm weird like that.
