How To Build A Girl - Book Review

WARNING - SMALL SPOILERS

One of the things I love about books is the way you can either go into a far away magical land and escape reality for a while or you can be thrown into so different setting with a different life but still see it as yourself going through this along with all of your current life still taking place. So much so that you forget what is reality and what is fiction and that is 100% what happened with How To Build A Woman. Does that make sense?

The thing that gets me with this book is that I never lived in London, luckily never been on benefits, not even had my own dog yet some how you feel connected and so far away from Johanna. With this, you can't help but have the sudden life changing discovery with her that just makes you stop and think 'shit that was too much'. This book literally made me weep into my pillow, laugh out loud, stay awake until 2am and made me rethink everything about the way I grew up as a teenager and how shitty and awesome life can be sometimes. 

Johanna goes from a nobody to sleeping with rock stars and having a sex adventure and back to being a better version of herself through music, 'fuck boys' a lot of sex, friendship and more alcohol and cigarettes then I care to think about. I like you would have read that and thought 'wow, that sounds like an adventure' but its almost like Caitlin wanted to show the negatives in these things hidden within that is isn't until the end where you 'age with Johanna' as I like to see it that you realise actually just how awful her life had been during those 2-3 years. 

You experience her first experiences with cigarettes, which like most people, wasn't too impressed but the social part was nice. Alcohol which again, gross but fun until you find the right drink and the damn right truth about sex, over rated unless you are with someone who really badly want to fuck. (Sorry if that's TMI!) Although I am slightly disappointed and obviously very happy she didn't have the threesome...I think I just want to know how Caitlin would have wrote that scene if she did go ahead instead of fall asleep...

But I feel this just makes the whole experience so real. She changes herself to Dolly to become a better person, the person she dreamed off, only to find out that person was a dick. Anyone else had this experience?

Also can we lease give a shout out to her brother for simply being the best. He worked out she had started wanking and decided she was too grown up to share a room, sat in cupboards with her so she can vent and helped her when she started self harming to the point where she felt loved and calm again even though he definitely had better things to be doing. Brother of the year award right there people! 

I feel people may say it a lot nowadays (which is amazing don't get me wrong) but I do feel like its a book every teen should read as I genuinely feel that I have grown and changed with Johanna even though I am 2 years older then Johanna in the book. You really do go back and remember your first experiences with trying to have sex for the first time, being taught/told what to do by your friends and getting so drunk you want to die in a corner. 

It was a whirlwind of a book but I loved it.

Have you read it? 

Talk to you later x