Children's Fiction Special: So Super Starry, by Rose Wilkins<br></br>And That's When it Fell Off in My Hand
The glittery obsessions of teenage chick-lit
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Your support makes all the difference.Faced with these books' pink, sparkly covers, I reverted to a shadow of my mature self and began to relish the teenage characters and triviality of the "chick-lit" plots. Octavia, the heroine of So Super Starry, by Rose Wilkins (Macmillan, £9.99) lives up to the title with her seemingly perfect life at a school for the children of the rich and famous. She initially has no interest in the celebrity world until she is coerced by her glamorous and ambitious mother into accepting a party invitation from the prime 'It' girl of her year. Swept up in a flurry of events, it is not long before she begins to reconsider whether she truly belongs among these socialites. This is a trivial yet enjoyable book, catering for our insatiable appetite for information about famous people and the common ambition to become one of them.
By far the most enjoyable book I came across was And That's When it Fell Off in My Hand (HarperCollins, £10.99). This is the fifth in a series devoted to the journal entries of a certain Georgia Nicholson. Louise Rennison has again excelled herself with a level of truly outstanding humour while retaining complete accessibility, a rare combination in teenage novels. Here, Georgia must endure life without the sex god (aka Robbie), as idolised in her previous outpourings, who is on a gap year excursion to New Zealand. He is quickly awarded a new nickname, "The Marsupial Man", due to his fixation with wildlife and geothermals in his letter home instead of using the precious space to declare his undying love.
Such setbacks do not stop her erecting a shrine for him to celebrate their love, covering all the cosmic options with a picture of Buddha at one side of the sex god's photo and Jesus at the other, carefully secured to stop her little sister, Libby, using Jesus as a boyfriend for her scuba-diving Barbie.
In case this fails Georgia also pays a visit to "Call-me-Arnold" the vicar (with false eyelashes to complete her "simple and reverential look"). The small matter of her creation of a small inferno blaze on the headscarf of the pensioner in front of her does slightly sabotage her efforts to get along with the Lord.
Without doubt this book is the acme of current teenage chick-lit, though start with the first in the series, Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, for the full experience.
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