How to Build a Girl

July 7, 2014
“The 1990s are a bad time to be poor and not-famous,” thinks 14-year-old Johanna Morrigan, who lives with her parents and four siblings on a council estate in Wolverhampton. Arguably, the new millennium brought little relief on this front, but for Moran (How to Be a Woman), the gritty British landscape of adolescence, set to a loud ’90s soundtrack of the Stone Roses and the Mondays, is the stage for Johanna’s fabulous reinvention of herself. Adopting the pseudonym Dolly Wilde, Johanna educates herself in eyeliner and contemporary music and begins submitting record reviews to a London weekly. In the process, she grows up, has adventures far beyond the estate walls, and learns to love herself. Moran’s sharp sense of humor comes through in Johanna’s observations. Gratifying, too, are the constant stream of ’90s alt-rock references (Soup Dragons, anyone?) and the portrait of a pre-Internet world, where kids actually had actually leave their houses to find new identities. Unfortunately, Johanna’s voice feels forced, and her exploits seem to surpass what might have been believable chutzpah.

April 1, 2014

British cultural critic Moran broke out here with 2012's New York Times best-selling How To Be a Woman, an eye-opening look at women today through Moran's own life. Her fiction debut echoes aspects of her life--e.g., joining the music weekly Melody Maker at 16--before she became a prize-winning columnist at the London Times. Here, after an embarrassing incident on local TV, 14-year-old Johanna Morrigan decides to remake herself as out-there Dolly Wilde. Soon, she's drinking regularly, having lots of sex, and writing acidulous reviews of rock bands. But can you really build the perfect girl? With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 15, 2014
From British humorist Moran (How To Be A Woman, 2012, etc.), an overweight, socially inept teen drops out of school to become a rock critic and sexual adventuress. Fourteen-year-old Johanna Morrigan shares a bedroom with both her older and younger brothers, though the frequency of her trysts with her hairbrush might recommend otherwise. The birth of unexpected twin siblings, so far known only as David and Mavid, have made the family's Thatcher-era financial situation more desperate than ever. Her dad's attempts to revive his music career by networking at the local pub have led Johanna to conclude "the future only comes to our house when it is drunk." After a humiliating appearance on a local talk show, the unsinkable Johanna goes for re-invention from the ground up. She renames herself Dolly Wilde after Oscar's niece ("this amazing alcoholic lesbian who was dead scandalous"), assembles a wall collage of inspiring women and sexy men (including "Lenin when he was very young-I don't know exactly what he went on to do but I do know that he looks hot here"), and breaks away from her parents' playlist, substituting Bikini Kill and Courtney Love for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. By 1992, 17-year-old "Dolly" has wangled herself a job writing reviews at Disc and Music Echo magazine, which leads to her encountering and falling in love with a perfectly imagined rock star named John Kite, "the first person I'd ever met who made me feel normal." Their ecstatic, chaste night together is the high point of the book. After that, she weathers the perils of being both the meanest and easiest music critic in town. Hilarious autobiographical fiction debut for Britain's Lena Dunham-if you can forgive a dot too much nasty sex and poignant lessons learned.

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August 1, 2014
To make money when she fears she caused her struggling family's government benefits to be cut, teen library-junkie Johanna Morrigan submits a poem about her best friend, her dog, to a contest. She wins, nabbing a cash prize and a spot on Midlands Tonight. One on-air Scooby Doo impersonation later, Johanna is wishing she'd never been born until she decides she'll be reborn instead. Nearly overnight, autodidactic freaky fat girl Johanna becomes feared music reviewer Dolly Wilde, her tools of transformation being hair dye, eyeliner, a top hatall blackand her radio. As herself, Johanna is endearinghilarious, pathetic, and wise. Bawdy Dolly adopts a successful fake it till you make it approach, getting known by tearing new bands to shreds and hastily, gleefully, explicitly jettisoning Johanna's many virginities. Almost suddenly, though, Johanna feels she's missed the mark, because what is there to be afraid of, really? In her first novel, comedian Moran's (How to Be a Woman, 2012) characters are huggable and aggressively real; her setting1990s Wolverhampton and Londontouchable; and her depiction of growing up well worth reading. One heartily hopes there's more where this came from.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)