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Notes from the Teenage Underground
 
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Notes from the Teenage Underground (Paperback)

by Simmone Howell (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
RRP: £6.99
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Customers buy this book with Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin

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Product details

  • Paperback: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (2 Jul 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0747585121
  • ISBN-13: 978-0747585121
  • Product Dimensions: 19 x 12.8 x 2.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 407,837 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review
'Notes from the Teenage Underground is a smart, sassy look at three girls determined to prove themselves subversive and anti-establishment. An underground film project alters the friendship as the balance of power shifts between the three. Intelligent and alternative, this is one for the cool kids' The Bookseller

Product Description
Taking their anti-social edge one step further, seventeen year old Gem and her friends Mira and Lo have decided to go 'underground'. Their activities will be 'extreme', 'anti-establishment', 'avant-garde' and 'debauched'. While Gem makes an underground film and Mira sets about pursuing 'boys-without-barcodes' no one knows what it is that Lo - the most subversive of the three - has planned. But in the back of her mind, Gem's worried. She feels the balance of the trio's friendship is always weighted against her. And as the weeks draw closer to Christmas, appearances start to deceive and relationships flounder. For all the promise of the group, Underground seems a dark place to be. It will take great films, bad poetry and a pantheon of inspirational guides - from Andy Warhol to Germaine Greer - to help Gem work out the true meaning of friendship, where family fits in, and that the best parts of life aren't always underground.

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Average Customer Review
4.3 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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4.0 out of 5 stars Engaging if unoriginal debut novel, 29 Dec 2008
By tybalt-quin (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)      
Australian teenager Gem is named after Germaine Greer and lives with her feminist/New Age sculptor mum and whose sole contact with her father is the occasional haiku postcard from Tasmania. She and friends Lola and Mira have formed an Underground (think Goth fashion meets self-conscious intellectualism) to counter the "bar code" herd mentality at their school personified by beautiful and bitchy Bliss Dartford. Each summer the girls do a project and this year, they decide to hold Happenings - events inspired by Warhol's Factory, with each girl adopting a sub-project of her own. Inspired by Wahol's Kiss, Gem makes an Underground movie inspired by Warhol's kiss and she enlists the help of her workmates (and film students) at the local video store, Dodgy and Marco. In making the film, however, Gem is forced to reassess the nature of her friendship with Lola and Mira and her crush on the zit-faced Dodgy and in doing so, discovers a great deal about herself.

Despite the self-conscious intellectualism and desperation to be cool displayed by Gem's first person narration, the plot boils down to fancying boys, being desperate to have sex and dealing with mates who aren't necessarily mates. I didn't believe Gem's crush on Dodgy, mainly because he isn't established well enough on the page to create a genuine connection between them but also, Howell's description of his acne-riddled skin made me wonder what Gem saw in him in the first place. I would have also liked to see more of Lola on the page - mysterious and emotionally damaged (witnessed through her self-harm), Gem's idolisation of her and Lola's success at ingratiating herself with Gem's mother could have been further developed within the story and it's a shame that this doesn't happen.

The writing is polished and despite her simplistic enthusiasm for Warhol and film theory, Gem is a three-dimensional character who undergoes a genuine emotional transformation. The scene where the Underground crash a party at Bliss Dartford's is nicely handled as is Howell's unveiling of what Mira and Lo have been doing. The undermining of Gem by her friends isn't subtle but is credibly handled and well observed and the prose is engaging. The ending is perhaps a little too neatly wrapped up in a bow, but that's forgivable in a debut novel and it certainly wouldn't put me off from reading more from this author.
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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Deserving of Its Accolades, 28 Dec 2007
So when I first came across Gem, Lo and Mira they were trying so hard to be different that they appeared to contradict themselves. (Like in that South Park episode where Stan meets the Goths, who say that if he wants to hang out with them, he has have to wear black, write poems about pain and not be conformist.) But once I got over that, this was quite a good read, and is deserving of its accolades.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Courtesy of Teens Read Too, 5 April 2007
By TeensReadToo "Eat. Drink. Read. Be Merrier." (All Over the US & Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: Notes from the Teenage Underground (Hardcover)
NOTES FROM THE TEENAGE UNDERGROUND is a fantastic debut novel! It starts out with three best friends, Gem, Lo, and Mira, trying to come up with ideas for their summer project. The summer before was their Satan Summer; they dabbled in all things occult. The summer project has a theme, goals, and guides. This year, they want to do something spectacular; it could be their last summer project--who knows what the future will bring?

Lo is usually the one with ideas, but this time, Gem has some ideas of her own. Their theme for the year is Underground, whatever that means. Ug for short. Their guide? This is where Gem is inspired. She sees some of his work--four films of kissing couples playing over and over--at the National Gallery, and she decides, with a bit of help from her artsy mother, Bev, that Andy Warhol should be their guide into the world of the Underground (which at first kept making me think of riding the subway a lot...). She does some research into Andy Warhol, his work, his life, and the people around him, and then comes up with a goal: to make an Underground film.

During the course of this project, Gem realizes a lot of things about her life and her relationships. She feels like her friendship with Lo and Mira is an isosceles triangle; the two of them are close together, and Gem is all alone at one end. She's also being pressured to make some decisions about her future, as all seventeen-year-olds are. Her mother and Sharon, school counselor and Gem's godmother, want her to go to University, but Gem's a lot more interested in film school. Speaking of her love of movies, she's starting to think she could love something else at Video City, where she works--her coworker, Dodgy. On top of all of this, Gem's father, Rolf, has always been out of the picture, just sending the occasional weird haiku from where he lives out in the wilderness--but now it looks as though he could be stepping back into Gem's life, at least for awhile.

This summer is a turning point in Gem's life. When it's all over, Gem will be different. Her life will be different. This much is pretty obvious. But how will things change?

I really, really loved this book. It was a lot of fun to read, and the idea of the summer project was very interesting, something that set this book apart from a ton of others. Almost all young adult literature is about things changing, as that's what's always going on for teenagers, but Simmone Howell's novel had something that makes it stand out in my mind! If it's got Andy Warhol and obscure movies in it, it's got to be different.

Gem is a wonderful character. I really felt, while reading this, as if I knew her. She's very interesting, and what goes on in her mind is fascinating. I couldn't put this book down! I woke up at one in the morning, for some reason anxious to finish this book. That almost never happens to me! As I'm writing this, it's a little bit difficult to explain what about this book is so amazing, but there's something. It really captures the teenage experience. Simmone Howell obviously remembers this time in her life very well! I'm going to have to revise my `Best of 2006' list to add this one! This is a must read!

Reviewed by: Jocelyn Pearce
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