Dear Girls Above Me
This was a fun read, but I had some issues with it.
Charlie McDowell* started the popular Dear Girls Above Me Twitter feed on a whim, and he got a book deal out of it. Twitter-to-Book deals always seem sketchy to me, but this one had gotten pretty good reviews, so I picked it up from the library. Like I said, it was fun, but as this is a supposed novelization of the feed, it doesn't even have the virtue of really being about McDowell's life, and in parts it seems like he really had to stretch it to make his 'character' have a believable arc, so the book wouldn't entirely read like it was a commercial ploy to exploit these two girls even further.
*He's the son of Mary Steenburgen and Malcolm McDowell, and to his credit, this isn't something he highlights in the book, except for the horrifying story of the time he caught one of his friends, er, jerking his sausage, to a blurry sex scene his mother had done in a film before he was even born.
Make no mistake, the things the girls say are ridiculous and hilarious, but shoehorning 'Charlie' in there as well just felt forced. The book ends with 'Charlie' supposedly having learned something from his interaction with the girls, but I'm sort of at a loss to figure out what that something is. If you just want something funny, you'll probably love this, though. And the ending was pretty great -- I laughed out loud in the coffee shop where I was reading. I won't spoil it too much, but I will tell you that it involved mice, a broken sewage pipe, and the girls not following directions.
If you're looking for a quick read you could do worse than this, but don't go in expecting anything deep.
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