ttyl by Lauren Myracle
My rating: 2/5 cats
holy f*ck – i h8 this book! *shakes walker and geriatric meds at sky*
this book is like when you find someone’s diary at work (not a co-worker’s diary – that would make you a jerk) and you idly flip through it until you remember that most people are fucking boring and their innermost secrets are totally dull and most likely misspelled.
people like virginia woolf or anais nin get to have their diaries published because they are either very intelligent and insightful or super sexy. these girls are just superficial.
these aren’t diaries, they’re IMs, but the end result is the same. the format of this book sets it apart as “unique,” but it doesn’t change the fact that these characters are utterly trivial and a book that is only the IM’s of teenage girls, with no interior monologues or action sequences or descriptive passages is more like a trap than a novel. it is just all teen dialogue. vapid, vapid teen dialogue.
my reaction to this book is probably a result of my extreme old age. i do not text. i did not have a computer in high school, no gaggle of giggle parties in some chat room – in undergrad, i used my computer to write papers and play endless games of apeiron. if i wanted to talk to someone, i would walk over to them and use my mouth. (LGM).
so, i am most certainly not the target audience for this book. but i can’t see how young people who spend all day texting and instant messaging would want to read the instant messages of strangers/characters in their leisure time. and how this blossomed into a series is beyond me. i mean, gracious. kids these days…
a few things rescue this from being a one-star cat book. the energy is good – it is really fast-paced and takes about ten minutes to read. the characters have discrete voices – even though they each get their own color ink in the book, the reader can tell without that device which character is speaking. so – cheers on voice. also, the parts where two girls are “talking” about the third one behind her… keyboard?? display device?? is that the modern day equivalent of talking behind someone’s back? whatever – there is a spot-on well-intentioned cattiness that i certainly remember from my own high school days.
cute idea, but i am the wrong audience, like with musicians on the subway. I AM NOT GOING TO GIVE YOU MONEY BECAUSE YOU ARE ANNOYING ME.
and please reconsider that last name. srsly.
