Fair warning: I didn’t actually finish this book. I don’t plan to, either.

A lot of YA (young adult) lit involves dysfunctional parents. As with a lot of chick lit, some of these narrators are aware the parents are crazy, and some seem to just think they’re describing harmless wacky fun. This book, obviously (pink cover! “girl” and girly acronym in the title!) has some overlap with that category; it’s teen chick lit. And, unfortunately, it takes the “harmless wacky fun” attitude toward the parents.

I just couldn’t read it. I was hoping for a fun grrl power romp, which it may be. Hey, the girls want to go to a rock festival, and they’re not allowed, and then their annual school picnic (described as pretty much being a day when they can all dress their skimpiest and make out as much as possible) gets canceled – so rather than do yet another boring kids-sneak-out adventure, they plan their own local music festival!

Sounds fun and empowering, right? But I just couldn’t make it past the first chapter or two. The protagonist – like most chick lit protagonists – has very low self-esteem, and it became agonizingly clear early on that that’s mainly due to her mom’s emotional abuse. The narration treats her mom as if she’s going to be an amusing terror, but that only works if the character is sympathetic and loving when good people are around. Instead, we get classy scenes like this one, where I threw the book down for once and for all (page 43-44 in my paperback copy):

Okay, between you and me, [says Veronica, the protagonist and narrator], what terrifies me most about asking for help is being officially certified “dumb.” Don’t tell me it doesn’t happen. I’ve seen the special stickers they put on your personal files to signify “borderline retarded.” I’ve skated pretty close to this with a few school reports too. Not in cool lessons like English or religious studies, no, I tend to A grade them. I’m talking about maths and science. That’s where I blow, big time. Those snidey little remarks written on my end-of-year report cards really keep me awake at night:

“Ronnie is a capable girl but loses all interest when the going gets tough. Grade: D,” my science teacher bitched last year.

“Pah, that’s what you’re like with everything. You’ve always been a quitter,” snapped my mother helpfully.

“Gnnnngn,” I grunted, grasping around for one really difficult thing in my life I’ve actually finished. And failing.

I am such a loser.

It just killed me to read such a concrete, obvious example of how her mother’s rage was destroying Ronnie’s self-esteem. I mean, when she gets good grades in something, she doesn’t understand that she’s good at it or smart, she just thinks that means it’s “cool” and kind of tosses it aside; when she gets bad grades in something, she’s so traumatized that she thinks it means she’s stupid, or that she may be developmentally disabled in some way.

And she can’t ask for help because if even admitting her grades are bad makes her own mother call her names and shut her down, asking for help must mean something even worse would happen. She imagines that she wouldn’t get help, she would just reveal to everyone that there is “something wrong with her” and get labeled and set aside by the whole world. Because that’s all she’s experienced at home.

No wonder she “quits” when things are too hard – she can’t see any other options. This is typical of the way that abuse survivors are set up to self-sabotage at work, in our own projects, and just in life.

The author is, at least, clear that Veronica’s parents are fighting and that their fighting in front of her is not okay, that it terrifies her – which usually means that the fighting will be resolved later on in the book. When I typed that quote up, I remembered that and regained some hope that the book would eventually come around. Maybe author Grace Dent really got how terrible the mom was, and they would have a heart-to-heart where the mom vows to get help and change her ways….

So I flipped through the rest of it. Here’s what happens: the mom TAKES OFF. Disappears to her own mother’s house. Doesn’t tell Ronnie she’s leaving. Ronnie, who is in the middle of planning a freaking music festival at age 14, doesn’t realize her mom has gone until FOUR days later – nobody, apparently, thinks to talk to her about it at all, including her father. When someone who works in the family restaurant admits her mother has gone, Ronnie calls her and her mom, if you can believe this, goes, “Oh, hello, darling. Oh, so you’ve eventually called me. Have you run out of clean knickers or something?” And rather than being outraged that her mom ran off, didn’t tell her, didn’t call her, and is now being a passive-aggressive bitch about it, what does Ronnie think? “Touché.” GAH!!!!

And then it’s all, blah blah blah, music festival, blah blah blah, agonizing about whether her mom will ever come back, blah blah, and at the veeery end her mom comes back, out of nowhere, no warning at all, and her dad is all “This is the best excuse anyone has ever given you in the whole world,” and the excuse is that her mom went nuts and ran off because she’s PREGNANT and the dad had said they were “too old to have another little baby in the house.” And Ronnie, of course, agrees that this is the best excuse EVER because it means she will be a big sister and hey, who wouldn’t go nuts if they had “a real actual person growing” inside of them. OH DEAR GOD.

I should have expected all this, really, because the book’s dedication reads, “for mam – who lives with the world’s worst teenager”. And usually people who think they were the world’s worst teenager are people who have no perspective on normal child development or on how abusive a family has to be to result in “the world’s worst teenager.” Hey, I work at an outpatient drug and alcohol treatment center for teenagers – I KNOW.

So in short: not worth the pain of reading it to get to the great bits about how she and her friends successfully throw this festival, or the one time her mom says something nice to her about how “competent” she is. There are a lot of other books out there; read one of those.