Undiscovered Girl by Allison Burnett is a searing and poignant portrayal of a very lost child. Burnett has written an excellent twenty-first century sequel to Go Ask Alice, the 1970s novel about a young woman lost to drugs. This time round, teenage-hood in all its modern dimensions is even more alienating and dangerous because of its duality: connection is offered through online blogging but the utter anonymity of online communication renders such connection ineffectual, and even worse, damaging in how it empowers the most destructive of behavior while offering no reward for moderation in action or reflection.
Katie, the narrator, begins blogging to document her year off after high school. She quickly becomes absorbed by the blogging, a vehicle for both invention and venting, and her blog becomes hugely popular due to its outrageousness, its sexual details, and its intimate sharing on family and friends. Katie is gratified by the popularity and feels both validated and understood. But the support and understanding seemingly offered by her online community is anonymous and amorphous; the empowerment she feels blogging leads her away from some good decisions and gives positive reenforcement to some bad ones; even negative reenforcement, as when her readers disapprove of her actions, makes Katie only more stubborn and self-destructive.
Katie provoked feelings of utter impatience, undeniable disgust, and keening protectiveness. As the mother of teenagers, my stomach clenched while Katie missiled towards catalcysm, and like all parents, I clutched at straws of hope that she would brake, stop, assess, and save herself. Her own mother, trying to rebuild her own life after marriage to an alcoholic and years of financial struggle, is painfully unaware of what her daughter is going through on a daily basis; only her blogging community knows but they don’t really know Kate at all, as much as they read her and comment back to her. They are behind a barrier of anonymity and cannot reach her; her mother is behind another barrier of disconnection, and her friends (so-called) and lovers are behind yet another, one built of selfishness and deceit. It is only a matter of time before those barriers become walls of enclosure and suffocation, yellow tapes marking the scene of disaster, with Katie in the center of it all.
By Malina Saval “The Secret Lives of Boys” on 7/11/09
My absolute favorite line of this book: “Marriage is sacred only to those who have never been married.”
But I can’t stop there. There are so many painfully disturbing snatches of precocious wit and fierce honesty in this work it’s difficult to just pick one stand-out moment. I am undone by this book. Completely–there is no adequate word other than–WOWED by what it puts forth in incendiary print. This read will takes me days to shake off–it’s that strong a book. I finished it and was like, “What the F*%^!” The end is a brilliantly clever plot twist that made me in turns both excited and furious. Did I know Katie at all? Was Katie lying to me the entire time? Was her entire life a construct of her destructively vivid imagination? Did she romanticize everything in her world because the banal truth was too under-stimulating for her to take? Did Katie betray me, or was it me that got duped, believing her when she made every attempt to warm me that “honesty is a lie?” I swear, Allison Burnett–yes, folks, he IS a guy–crafted the character of Katie, an eighteen year-old girl with such spot-on accuracy it’s downright eerie. Creepy as some of Katie’s boy toys. Burnett stands to become this generation’s Gustave Flaubert of YA lit (rhymes with clit. Ha! …OK, I’m getting a little Katie crazy here but I feel like this is something she would say). His ability is striking, breathtaking. If you’ve been Katie, are Katie, known a Katie then you must must must READ this gorgeously written, sometimes maddening account of one teenage girl’s dangerous descent into darkness. Wow wow WOW.
By Michael G, SoulCraftMedia.com on 7/11/09
It’s a great book – the perfect 1st person blovel – that’s blog and novel – for the Anonymity Age. It’s not only a great character study – the voice authentic and charming, smart, funny, haunting – but it’s a very clever piece of meta-fiction that poses questions about morality and identity – as well as what is “true” about fiction. But the clever exploration of form does not detract from the powerful content. There’s real emotional truth in this piece of superior fiction!
Undiscovered Girl by Allison Burnett is a searing and poignant portrayal of a very lost child. Burnett has written an excellent twenty-first century sequel to Go Ask Alice, the 1970s novel about a young woman lost to drugs. This time round, teenage-hood in all its modern dimensions is even more alienating and dangerous because of its duality: connection is offered through online blogging but the utter anonymity of online communication renders such connection ineffectual, and even worse, damaging in how it empowers the most destructive of behavior while offering no reward for moderation in action or reflection.
Katie, the narrator, begins blogging to document her year off after high school. She quickly becomes absorbed by the blogging, a vehicle for both invention and venting, and her blog becomes hugely popular due to its outrageousness, its sexual details, and its intimate sharing on family and friends. Katie is gratified by the popularity and feels both validated and understood. But the support and understanding seemingly offered by her online community is anonymous and amorphous; the empowerment she feels blogging leads her away from some good decisions and gives positive reenforcement to some bad ones; even negative reenforcement, as when her readers disapprove of her actions, makes Katie only more stubborn and self-destructive.
Katie provoked feelings of utter impatience, undeniable disgust, and keening protectiveness. As the mother of teenagers, my stomach clenched while Katie missiled towards catalcysm, and like all parents, I clutched at straws of hope that she would brake, stop, assess, and save herself. Her own mother, trying to rebuild her own life after marriage to an alcoholic and years of financial struggle, is painfully unaware of what her daughter is going through on a daily basis; only her blogging community knows but they don’t really know Kate at all, as much as they read her and comment back to her. They are behind a barrier of anonymity and cannot reach her; her mother is behind another barrier of disconnection, and her friends (so-called) and lovers are behind yet another, one built of selfishness and deceit. It is only a matter of time before those barriers become walls of enclosure and suffocation, yellow tapes marking the scene of disaster, with Katie in the center of it all.
My absolute favorite line of this book: “Marriage is sacred only to those who have never been married.”
But I can’t stop there. There are so many painfully disturbing snatches of precocious wit and fierce honesty in this work it’s difficult to just pick one stand-out moment. I am undone by this book. Completely–there is no adequate word other than–WOWED by what it puts forth in incendiary print. This read will takes me days to shake off–it’s that strong a book. I finished it and was like, “What the F*%^!” The end is a brilliantly clever plot twist that made me in turns both excited and furious. Did I know Katie at all? Was Katie lying to me the entire time? Was her entire life a construct of her destructively vivid imagination? Did she romanticize everything in her world because the banal truth was too under-stimulating for her to take? Did Katie betray me, or was it me that got duped, believing her when she made every attempt to warm me that “honesty is a lie?” I swear, Allison Burnett–yes, folks, he IS a guy–crafted the character of Katie, an eighteen year-old girl with such spot-on accuracy it’s downright eerie. Creepy as some of Katie’s boy toys. Burnett stands to become this generation’s Gustave Flaubert of YA lit (rhymes with clit. Ha! …OK, I’m getting a little Katie crazy here but I feel like this is something she would say). His ability is striking, breathtaking. If you’ve been Katie, are Katie, known a Katie then you must must must READ this gorgeously written, sometimes maddening account of one teenage girl’s dangerous descent into darkness. Wow wow WOW.
It’s a great book – the perfect 1st person blovel – that’s blog and novel – for the Anonymity Age. It’s not only a great character study – the voice authentic and charming, smart, funny, haunting – but it’s a very clever piece of meta-fiction that poses questions about morality and identity – as well as what is “true” about fiction. But the clever exploration of form does not detract from the powerful content. There’s real emotional truth in this piece of superior fiction!