Are These My Basoomas I See Before Me? - Louise Rennison

First book review of this blog is Are These My Basoomas I See Before Me? by Louise Rennison.  This is the tenth (and final) installment in the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series.  I read book one of this series back in middle school and have eagerly awaited every subsequent book.  This one was published in 2009 so I'm obviously behind a bit.  But even after a three year hiatus from the series, I picked right back up with the characters immediately.  When I was picking this book up from the library, I wondered if it would be smart of me to start a few books back, just to refresh my memory.  But I didn't want to carry a bunch of books back home so I opted to just go with it and I could always Google any plot questions I had along the way.  Google was not needed.  It was like I had never left Georgia, Jazz and the rest of the Ace Gang and their boy troubles.  And I think that that is the mark of a great series and one of the reasons I picked it as my first book.

This series is considered 'teen lit' or, as I prefer, young adult fiction.  It is about a group of teenage girls and their relationships with themselves, their parents, and, of course, boys.  It is written in the epistolary style (I think that is the correct phrasing of it), if you want to use the correct literary term.  But in everyday speech, it's written as a diary.  Georgia's diary.  I really like pieces written in this style because I feel like it makes the reader more easily immersed in this world.  It feels like you are reading a real girl's diary.  and you immediately get Georgia's take on everything without a filter or without the 'author' getting in the way to keep some things secret for a twist later.  And, in this series, the time stamps for the entries are in real time.  So you don't even have Georgia glossing over some things as she sums up her day at night, she is giving the reader a play by play of every angst and emotion filled teenage girl moment.  And it is wonderful.  Louise Rennison did a great job capturing the teenage girl voice.  Never once was there a place where I felt that Georgia wouldn't have used that word or she seemed a bit too self-aware for a teenage girl.  Rennison was flawless in this sense.  I should mention that this series is filled with British teenage slang (Rennison is British) so it is possible that maybe the slang used in these books is outdated, but I, as an American, have no idea so it seemed flawless to me.  And along those same lines, there is a glossary in the back which I found very helpful. Georgia is a real teenager.  She has her insecurities, gets lost in her thoughts, over-thinks little things that boys say, and fights with her parents.  She is real.  I could see parts of myself in Georgia, which I think is a real strength of this character.  She is by no means generic or boring, she is one of the most interesting characters I've read in a long time, and everyone can see a part of themselves in her.

It could be a downfall of the style, it could be because it was the final book of the series, but I saw the ending of this book coming from a mile away.  And by that I meant that about half way though the book I went "oh, I bet X,Y, and Z are going to happen" and then as each new major plot point unraveled, it went along with my guess and then at the end, I was correct!  Don't get me wrong, I love it when a book ends the way I want it too.  And its not like I guessed the murder's identity half way though or anything major like that.  The, what I found obvious, plot movement toward the resolution didn't ruin the journey for me.  I was still turning pages just as quickly to see if my guess was correct.  I didn't know until literally the last page if I was correct or not.  I just wish that I didn't know what was going to happen until maybe a few pages before.  I wanted there to be more mystery to the journey.

Overall, I say read it.  Read the whole series.  It honestly won't take you long.  They are just fun books.  If you're past your teen years, you can reconnect to the highs and lows of those years.  And if you're in your teens, you can see that someone else is going through the same things you are, which is a lot of help sometimes.

*Special note: there is now a movie based on the first books in the series (first two I think?)

Rating: 3/5.  Fun fun fun reading
310 pages