Book: Geek Girl (Geek Girl #1)
Author: Holly Smale
Pages: 356 (Paperback)
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: February 28th, 2013
Synopsis:
Harriet Manners knows that a cat has 32 muscles in each ear, a jiffy lasts 1/100th of a second, and the average person laughs 15 times per day. She knows that bats always turn left when exiting a cave and that peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.
But she doesn’t know why nobody at school seems to like her.
So when Harriet is spotted by a top model agent, she grabs the chance to reinvent herself. Even if it means stealing her best friend’s dream, incurring the wrath of her arch enemy Alexa, and repeatedly humiliating herself in front of impossibly handsome model Nick. Even if it means lying to the people she loves.
Veering from one couture disaster to the next with the help of her overly enthusiastic father and her uber-geeky stalker, Toby, Harriet begins to realise that the world of fashion doesn’t seem to like her any more than the real world did.
As her old life starts to fall apart, will Harriet be able to transform herself before she ruins everything?
Source: Harper Collins
My opinion:
warning: contains slight spoilers
I mainly bought this book to entertain myself for an evening. Well. What I did, was reading it in only a few hours. What I did not, was enjoy it a lot. Yes, there were some good parts, especially towards the end, but the rest was just… not my thing really.
Geek Girl starts off with a whole class of teenagers going to some fabric thingy where I still don’t really know what it is, nor do I know why exactly they went there. I’m fairly sure it’s because of some school subject, but ??? I don’t really know. Anyways, the main character Harriet does not want to go there, because she hates fashion, her classmates and basically everything that trip is about. Except for her best (and only) friend Nat, who forces her to go. Nat is very pretty and fashionable and her big dream is to become a model.
But of course, Harriet, who hates fashion and modelling, is spied by a model agent. And that model agent is just so… stereotypical. He uses phrases like “my little panda baby”, is a bit off the moon and somewhat annoying. And Harriet doesn’t tell her parents anything about this but suddenly has this huge job going on and goes behind her stepmother’s back, together with her dad to work on this. And it seems all so very unrealistic. Of course, drama can’t be amiss! What Harriet tried to keep a secret – especially from Nat, because she got a model job instead of her – becomes public and suddenly Harriet seems to be all alone. She was never popular, for several reasons: first, she talks. A lot. Second, she talks about things nobody is interested in, because they are geeky things. Which is also the third reason. She is a geek. And of course, what other hair colour could a geek have than red? And of course a geek cannot be interested in fashion and modelling, that just doesn’t fit, does it? And why should a geek have friends and be popular?
No. This part bothered me the most because it only shows the typical nerd without any friends who probably hides inside their house all day. But that paints a very wrong picture. Geeks and nerds are just normal people and even if they might be outsiders at school, there are still online communities, and they wonderful communities.
And then she gets a model job and everything seems to get better. Here comes a thing that really surprised me about the story. Harriet doesn’t get super popular. She is still what she was before and she realizes, that she is not better in anyway, nor are older people suddenly better than her classmates. I thought this was somehow really good because I am really sick of the unpopular girl gets famous and becomes popular all of a sudden trope. So I was very happy to see that this wasn’t the case with Geek Girl. What I liked though, was the character development of Harriet, because she comes to accept who she is and that nothing can change that and the most important thing, that she doesn’t want it changed.
But what I need to say is, that this book is for younger readers than I am. And maybe they think different about it because many girls (and boys) might dream of a model/actor/singer/etc career and this book shows that it is not impossible to achieve such a thing. The writing style was fitting, easy and fast to read.
So yeah, unfortunately I was not a huge fan of this book.
Rating:
★★/5
