The Notebook Girls: Four Friends, One Diary - Softcover

Baskin, Julia; Newman, Lindsey; Pollitt-Cohen, Sophie; Toombs, Courtney

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446578622 ISBN 13: 9780446578622

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2006

Synopsis

Everyone likes to think they started the notebook. Sophie claims she stole the idea from two girls in her math class. Courtney still has a death grip on the theory that the notebook was her invention. Lindsey doesn't really care; she's just along for the ride. And Julia never knows what's going on anyway.What we do know is that we started the notebook in freshman year at Stuyvesant High School as a way to keep in contact when our conflicting schedules denied us one another's company.

It allowed us to express ourselves and our views of the world in a tone of complete sarcasm, obscenity, and blind honesty. We've spent a significant portion of our adolescence trying to figure out who we are. The notebook is the closest we've come.We're just a group of normal girls with normal lives. Our notebook is meant to make you laugh and make you remember.

About this title

About the Author

Julia Baskin, Lindsey Newman, Sophie Pollitt-Cohen, and Courtney Toombs live in New York City.

Reviews

Adult/High School–In 2002, during the second half of their freshman year at Manhattan's Stuyvesant High School, four girls began to keep a shared notebook that served as a joint diary and a compendium of letters to one another. Edited only by the authors during the writing and initial reading process, the volume serves as a front-row seat on those aspects of the teens' lives that they deemed interesting or important enough to record. The reproduction of the notebook maintains their handwriting as well as photocopies of the snapshots, sketches, and occasional wrappers and other realia they inserted into its pages. Stuyvesant High is a public exam school, and these girls are brainy, well-educated, and conscious of class. Across the years–the notebook ends midway through their junior year–they show themselves to be self-centered, bold, and whiny by turns, as well as insightful, playful, and in possession of the other hallmark moods one expects from contemporary teenage girls in middle-class America. Their behaviors may seem extreme in some parts of the country while equally expected in others: they drink, engage in sex with varying degrees of protection, explore illicit drugs, procrastinate about homework, and are generally free of politically correct speech about any group–whether other or themselves. Their willingness to expose their adolescence to readers makes their story, or combined stories, engrossing. Readers who like Ann Brashares's fiction may also line up to explore the gritty reality presented here.–Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

To newly minted ninth graders, high school can seem overwhemingly big and scary. So Julia Baskin, Lindsey Newman, Sophie Pollitt-Cohen and Courtney Toombs thought up a way to make theirs, Stuyvesant High School in New York City, feel a little smaller. They bought a notebook and took turns writing to each other -- sort of a Sisterhood of the Traveling Composition Book, if you will. Two years and several notebooks later, the result is The Notebook Girls: Four Friends. One Diary. Real Life (Warner; paperback, $22.95). (When Pollitt-Cohen's father learned of the notebooks, he saw potential for publication and suggested the girls get in touch with an agent; their idea had garnered them a book deal.) Crafted to look like an actual notebook (down to its mottled, black-and-white cover), the book is almost compulsively readable -- a breezy, voyeuristic delight packed with the four friends' true tales of their high school experiences, from break-ups and make-ups to cute teachers and downright ugly chemistry grades. The girls' handwriting, interspersed with doodles and photos, can be almost illegible. And what they have to say may prove hard for some parents to read. Different ones of the four drink, smoke, swear, do drugs and have sex, and they aren't afraid of getting down and dirty with the details. "Yeah so alcohol rocks my world," muses Courtney. There's Sophie getting caught with marijuana in a public playground; Lindsey's drunken weekend at her sister's college; the Jewish youth group event where Julia engages in oral sex for the first time. When the friends make a much anticipated pilgrimage to CBGB, the legendary music club, and get turned away at the door, it tak!

es a moment to realize why: They're not all 16 yet.

Many entries are nevertheless mature and insightful, traversing "You hooked up with him?!" terrain to tackle topics such as racism, sexism and sexual orientation. Sept. 11, 2001, looms large in everyone's thoughts, in part because they had to evacuate their school, which was mere blocks from the Twin Towers. "I remember turning around to look back [at the World Trade Center]," Sophie writes, "but it was just a huge cloud of dust."

Still, the passages that resonate the most are those in which the girls act like, well, girls. Sophie draws singer Axl Rose's various alter egos, including "Axl Bows" and "Axl Snows." Julia insists that everyone refer to an "order of business" as an "oob." Courtney, writing about her mother, asks that age-old question: "Why doesn't she just die + leave me alone?" Most of the time, the girls seem as if they're on a race to see who can get to "grown-up" first. Maybe that's why these silly, prototypically teenage moments are so affecting.

Girls Will Be Girls
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

The creators of The Notebook Girls are four contemporary Manhattan teens, who started the notebook as a way to stay connected with each other. The power here is in the raw honesty, and the format--handwritten pages and pasted-in photos--gives even more immediacy. These are girls who speak in bawdy, vulgar language; tease and tell fart jokes; worry about their bodies, their futures, and their friendships; and experiment with drinking, drugs, and sex. These girls share sharp observations and a strong sense of identity. "Who the fuck are these guys?" asks one girl. "Who gave them the right to comment on girls' bodies like that?" The communal format creates more jockeying and joking and less personal revelation than a diary might. But this title offers a fascinating view of what it means, then and now, to grow up female. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0446578622
• ISBN 13: 9780446578622
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352