How To Build A Girl ~ Caitlin Moran

Oh Caitlin Moran, where to start? Your wit? Your humour? Your eyeliner?  All are consistently awesome. Though maybe I should stop before this gets a bit like a certain Dolly Wilde article (#spoilers) and just say I’m a bit of a fan.

This is my second delve into one of Moran’s novels, How To Be a Woman was *que slightly ashamed head tilt* the first real book or even article on feminism I’d ever read; it remains to this day one of my favourite books, massively thought provoking while being ridiculously funny but I digress; the point is I finally got round to reading the latest offering and was not disappointed!

So, how to summarise without ruining everything for you, Johanna Morrigan is a 14 year old who simply wants a little bit more than her current lot in life; sound familiar? I’d be surprised if most people didn’t relate to her even a little bit; but personally it almost creepy.  Johanna wants her life to be like a film; she wants to make something of herself but (let’s be honest) unlike most of us she decides to do something about it.  She becomes the character which inside her head she believes she needs to be and starts to live, professionally at least as Dolly Wilde.  Through Dolly and a shit-tonne of eyeliner she finds the confidence to start pursuing her dreams of writing and finds herself thrown into the new, exciting world she thinks she’s always wanted to be a part of.

More than the actual plot of midlands teenager becomes London journalist, this supposedly semi-autobiographically novel is about a girl growing up, about personal discovery and what I love the most about Moran’s writing is that she doesn’t fluff things up or round off corners.  The situations Johanna finds herself in throughout How to Build a Girl could be real and they’re written honestly, sometimes shockingly honestly.  As someone who was once a teenage girl and has subsequently become an adult woman there are so many things I look back on and wish I could have done differently; there were so many points through reading this I wanted to shout aloud at the book “Don’t. Just don’t.” and continued to read through cringey giggles.

Being fairly local to Wolverhampton the constant local references made me smile, but I imagine they’d be just as amusing and relatable to anyone outside of the midlands. 

I found it addictive from the off; if you’ve not read it I highly recommend heading down to your local book retailer and reading the first two pages.  I actually tried this with my boyfriend who’s summary of the start of the book was that it contained the best metaphor for the Berlin wall he’d ever heard – and no I won’t explain, just go find out.

Tomorrow Never Dies

Sunday 26th April

We start in a rather chilly terrorist base neat the Russian border being watched by agents equipped with the latest periscope recording equipment (surely with inbuilt VCR) which is streaming to an intelligence base giving M and the British army a who’s who of the terrorists in the overly detailed style of a 90s Saturday evening family entertainment show.  Amongst all this Bond has taken it upon himself to promote the dangers of smoking, proving how a single cigarette can trigger several unwanted missiles and torpedoes to destroy a whole basecamp.

The Carver Media Group, if only they’d had twitter, the whole thing would have been much simpler for them. Undercover as a banker James infiltrates the kick off party and rather unsurprisingly has Mrs Caver leaving her husband for him within a matter of hours and even less unsurprisingly like all of James’ conquests turned clingy she also dies within a matter of hours.

Like all good Bond films James has a new lady friend in this instalment, this time she has a german accent and four wheels; it would appear Q has outdone himself, providing 007 with a female version of knightrider – I was never a fan so no idea who is ripping who off here but for me the Mario Kart style car chases in this defiantly gives this version the edge.

In essence Elliot Carver is taking advantage of the pre-facebook ages where people still read newspapers to manipulate the news to cause world war three starting between China and the UK. Lucky then that Bond befriends a Chinese agent during his adventure so together they can try to warn their homelands that they are essentially being played by the middle man.

Once again we’re into the last twenty minutes of the film when everything starts kicking off, and once again we’re on a secret underwater base and it’s the five minute countdown until missile launch; surely by now someone has created a device which can launch a missile without the incessant countdown which may as well be called “countdown to being deactivated with less than 5 seconds to spare by some extremely unlikely and unplanned by Bond’s part”.  With two minutes to go James has just crawled out of another explosion and it’s time for the one to one between Bond and the main villain, with him dead it’s time to defeat Elliot’s main henchman, save the girl from drowning and disable the missile – all with forty seconds to go.  The obvious answer, allow the missile to explode, just don’t let it launch; leave the henchman trapped next to the missile then jump into the sea to give the girl mouth to mouth underwater under the explosion is over – simple really.

I quite liked this; I think mainly because it was almost a clever play on how easily manipulated we all are by the media; send a British missile hurtling into China and it won’t take them long to decide who sent it – or maybe I’m thinking too much into this… erm…. Cars, bikes, explosions yeh!