How to Build a Girl

Publisher Marketing: The "New York Times" bestselling author hailed as the UK s answer to Tina Fey, Chelsea Handler, and Lena Dunham all rolled into one ("Marie Claire") makes her fiction debut with a hilarious yet deeply moving coming-of-age novel. What do you do in your teenage years when you realize what your parents taught you wasn t enough? You must go out and find books and poetry and pop songs and bad heroes and build yourself. It s 1990. Johanna Morrigan, fourteen, has shamed herself so badly on local TV that she decides there s no point in being Johanna anymore and reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde fast-talking, hard-drinking Gothic hero and full-time Lady Sex Adventurer. She will save her poverty-stricken Bohemian family by becoming a writer like Jo in "Little Women," or the Brontes but without the dying young bit. By sixteen, she s smoking cigarettes, getting drunk, and working for a music paper. She s writing pornographic letters to rock stars, having all the kinds of sex with all kinds of men, and eviscerating bands in reviews of six hundred words or less. But what happens when Johanna realizes she s built Dolly with a fatal flaw? Is a box full of records, a wall full of posters, and a head full of paperbacks enough to build a girl after all?Imagine "The Bell Jar" written by Rizzo from "Grease. How to Build a Girl" is a funny, poignant, and heartbreakingly evocative story of self-discovery and invention, as only Caitlin Moran could tell it." Review Citations: Library Journal Prepub Alert 04/01/2014 pg. 67 (EAN 9780062335975, Hardcover) Publishers Weekly 07/07/2014 (EAN 9780062335975, Hardcover) Booklist 08/01/2014 pg. 12 (EAN 9780062335975, Hardcover) Kirkus Reviews 08/15/2014 (EAN 9780062335975, Hardcover) - *Starred Review Library Journal 09/15/2014 pg. 70 (EAN 9780062335975, Hardcover) - *Starred Review Romantic Times 10/01/2014 pg. 37 (EAN 9780062335975, Hardcover) People Weekly 10/06/2014 pg. 50 (EAN 9780062335975, Hardcover) Shelf Awareness 09/26/2014 (EAN 9780062335975, Hardcover) Entertainment Weekly 10/10/2014 pg. 38 (EAN 9780062335975, Hardcover) New York Times Book Review 10/12/2014 pg. 12 (EAN 9780062335975, Hardcover) New York Times Book Review 10/19/2014 pg. 26 (EAN 9780062335975, Hardcover) New Yorker (The) 11/24/2014 pg. 127 (EAN 9780062335975, Hardcover) Contributor Bio:  Moran, Caitlin Caitlin Moran was named Columnist of the Year by the British Press Awards in 2010 and Critic and Interviewer of the Year in 2011 for her work in the Times of London. Her debut book, How to Be a Woman, won the 2011 Galaxy Book of the Year Award and was an instant New York Times bestseller. How to Build a Girl is her first novel since the one she wrote at fourteen, which doesn't count.