Monday, July 23, 2012

Louise Rennison Is Always Good For A Laugh

My very second blog post back in March, 2002 related to Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging. I am a serious Georgia Nicholson fan. If I'm going to read a book about boyfriends and shopping, Georgia better be in it.

Georgia's creator, Louise Rennison, has an excellent new series out, about Georgia's younger cousin, Tallulah. Tallulah could be said to have a little more depth than Georgia. Her interests  involve more than boys but not to the point that it ruins her sense of humor.

In Withering Tights Tallulah is off to Yorkshire, home of the Brontes and the school for performing arts where she's putting in a summer session rather than do an Outward Bound course with her brother. What, exactly, is Tallulah's performing talent? Ah...well. She and her friends have read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, though, and are capable of some really clever Heathcliff and Mrs. Rochester jokes. In the Glossary at the back of the book, Tallulah defines Heathcliff as "The 'hero' of Wuthering Heights. Although no one knows why."

I found the boy interests in this book a little more touching than I recall feeling about Georgia's many, many, many interactions with boys. Everything's still funny, but there's also an underlying feeling that these are more realistic young people moving on in life.

Happy Day! I am coming late to Tallulah. She already has a book of second artistic adventures, A Midsummer Tights Dream.

Plot Project: Hey, this book starts with a disturbance to Tallulah's world--she's off to a performing arts college where she must board with a local family she's never met and meet all new people. The artistic types at the school...the Brontes... This is a plot that definitely seems to me to have evolved from its original situation.

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