Undiscovered Gyrl (Vintage Contemporaries Orig) - Softcover

Burnett, Allison

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307473120 ISBN 13: 9780307473127

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009

Synopsis

Beautiful, wild, funny, and lost, Katie Kampenfelt is taking a year off before college to find her passion. Ambitious in her own way, Katie intends to do more than just smoke weed with her boyfriend, Rory, and work at the bookstore. She plans to seduce Dan, a thirty-two-year-old film professor.

Katie chronicles her adventures in an anonymous blog, telling strangers her innermost desires, shames, and thrills. But when Dan stops taking her calls, when her alcoholic father suffers a terrible fall, and when she finds herself drawn into a dangerous new relationship, Katie's fearless narrative begins to crack, and dark pieces of her past emerge.

Sexually frank, often heartbreaking, and bursting with devilish humor, Undiscovered Gyrl is an extraordinarily accomplished novel of identity, voyeurism, and deceit.

"Imagine an 18-year-old Lolita, updated for the 21st century, blogging her own provocative adventures. By turns charming and crude, disturbingly reckless and achingly tender, Undiscovered Gyrl seduces you into her downy arms, locks her long legs around your waist, and doesn't let go." — Rachel Resnick, author of Love Junkie

About this title

Review:

Amazon Exclusive: Christopher Rice Reviews Undiscovered Gyrl

Christopher Rice is the author of the New York Times bestsellers A Density of Souls, The Snow Garden, Light Before Day, and Blind Fall. The son of author Anne Rice and the late poet Stan Rice, he lives in Los Angeles. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of Undiscovered Gyrl:

Undiscovered Gyrl is the blog of beautiful, blond, Katie Kampenfelt, an 18-year-old girl who seeks to record, for her own edification, the year following her high school graduation.

The novel begins as the diary of an ebullient, funny teenager, filled with the musings, mood swings, and escapades of youth. We are in her skin as she plots her break-up with her college-age boyfriend, battles with her mother, considers whether to sleep with a 32-year-old film professor, confronts a terrible truth about her new boss, and lands a new job as nanny to a newborn.

Soon, however, the story deepens into the engrossing record of a young soul in peril.

Gossip Girl this ain’t.

Allison Burnett's novel reads as both a searing glimpse into a tortured teenage psyche, and a skillful meditation on the cruel excesses of the Internet Age. Katie Kampenfelt's voice feels utterly authentic, disturbingly so, making for a protagonist who is as riveting as she is infuriating.

The story is revealed through a series of terse blog entries, but they are studded with haunting imagery and unforgettable turns of phrase. Ultimately, this is the dark tale of one girl's unquenchable thirst for love and acceptance, but Allison Burnett tells it with a fearlessness that elevates those time-worn concepts above the realm of Hollywood cliché.

Prepare yourself for a page-turning, single-sitting read that will leave you disarmed and disturbed and questioning your own engagement with the Internet's capacity for anonymity and fantasy.--Christopher Rice

(Photo © Gwen and Eddie Photography)

About the Author:

Allison Burnett is a screenwriter in LA and the author of Christopher, a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, and The House Beautiful.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0307473120
• ISBN 13: 9780307473127
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 293