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The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole [School & Library Binding]

Sue Townsend (Author)
4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (90 customer reviews)


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Book Description

September 2003

The brand new edition of the hilarious, bestselling follow-up to The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 and 3/4 , Sue Townsend's The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole.

Sunday July 18th.

My father announced at breakfast that he is going to have a vasectomy. I pushed my sausages away untouched.

In this second instalment of teenager Adrian Mole's diaries, the Mole family is in crisis and the country is beating the drum of war. While his parents have reconciled after both embarked on disastrous affairs, Adrian is shocked to learn of his mother's pregnancy.

And even though at the mercy of his rampant hormones and the fickle whims of the divine Pandora, a victim of a broken home and his own tortured (though unrecognised) genius, Adrian continues valiantly to chronicle the pains and pleasures of a misspent adolescence.

'Adrian Mole will be remembered some day as one of England's great diarists' Evening Standard

'The funniest, most bitter-sweet book you're likely to read this year' Daily Mirror

'Funny, moving and a poke in the eye for adult morality' Sunday Express

Sue Townsend is Britain's favourite comic author. Since the publication of The Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole Aged 13 and 3/4 in 1982, she has made us weep with laughter and pricked the nation's conscience. Seven further volumes of diaries have followed: The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, The True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole, Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years, Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years, The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction and Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years. All have been acclaimed bestsellers, some have been adapted for radio and TV, starring Lulu, Julie Walters and Stephen Mangan, among others. She has also written six other popular novels (The Queen and I, Queen Camilla, Number Ten, Rebuilding Coventry, Ghost Children and The Woman Who Went to Bed for A Year) and penned many well-received plays. She lives in Leicester, where she was born and grew up.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.


Editorial Reviews

Review

Adrian Mole will be remembered some day as one of England's great diarists --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

About the Author

Sue Townsend is the author of The Queen and I and The Adrian Mole books. She lives in england. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


Product Details

  • School & Library Binding: 286 pages
  • Publisher: San Val; 1st HarperTempest Ed edition (September 2003)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0613684273
  • ISBN-13: 978-0613684279
  • Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (90 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,225,738 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

90 Reviews
5 star:
 (71)
4 star:
 (13)
3 star:
 (3)
2 star:
 (1)
1 star:
 (2)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.7 out of 5 stars (90 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars I laughed till I cried., June 24, 2003
By 
Judith C. Kinney (Westerville, OH USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
People who find out I read a lot sometimes ask, "What's the best book you ever read?" That is a question that's impossible to answer. I might be able to name the best baseball book I ever read or the best Jane Austen novel or the best biography of a political figure or the best historical fiction set in the middle ages or the best teen-age romance. But if anyone ever asks me, "What's the funniest book you ever read?" this one will be my answer.

This is the only book I've ever read that made me laugh out loud so hard I cried at the same time. This happened during the scene in which Adrian is contemplating running away and/or committing suicide and feeling exceedingly sorry for himself. I felt at the time it was cruel of me to be laughing over this poor adolescent's pain, but that just made it funnier. I was sitting at the kitchen table at the time, and the other members of the family who passed by thought I was nuts and said so.

Everyone's sense of humor is different. I like my humor dry and understated. I can't stand slapstick. I was about forty when I read this. Maybe you have to be old enough to look back on the agonies of adolescence and not give a rat's tail to enjoy this book.

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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Adrian Mole is ESSENTIAL reading, December 21, 1999
If Charles Shultz's saying "Happiness isn't funny" is true, then this book by definition qualifies as hilarious. Adrian Mole isn't just a teenager with typical adolescent angst; he's smack dab in the middle of Thatcher's Britain, on the wrong side of the tracks.

His parents are on the skids, he has neither dress sense, social grace, looks, intelligence, nor wit, but believes himself to be intellectual and artistically gifted.

Menaced and robbed by skinheads at school on a daily basis, pining for a middle-class girl on the fast-track to the upper class he'd so desperately want to join... he is the absolute metaphor for a latter 20th century England that is no longer on the cutting edge of anything, and, like a teenager realising subconsciously he has no future, dealing with the reality that it will never live up to its past glory or future expectations.

Savagely skewering the class system, granola-crunching intellectuals, adolescence, Thatcherism, and life in the Midlands, Sue Townsend has executed a real stroke of brilliance in making Mole so clueless. As the moron he is, he cannot filter nor embellish the truth that goes on around him, but reports it through his own naive eyes. This lets us see, for example, that his best friend is less than sane with a serious identity crisis, without the psychobabble.

These are dark, brutal books and could easily be rewritten as black tragedies... much of the humor comes from a sense of "Dei gratia sum quod sum." Yet they are funnier still for being so. If you are British or British-ex-pat or in a British-inspired country like Canada or Australia, you WILL see people you know in these characters.

This really is essential reading.

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Adrian Mole... Intellectual Genius, September 7, 2001
By A Customer
[....] Adrian Mole IS no normal 14 year old. Adrian fancies himself to be an "intellectual", something he repeatedly belies in his fanciful, yet absolutely dumb, comments (such as "When Rembrandt painted the Sistine Chapel", etc.) His language is purposely exaggerated to demonstrate his self-image.

That being said, I vaguely remember having read this in grade school; it wasn't until a leisurely browse through a discount book store that I chanced upon it again. It seemed warmly familiar, so I bought it. Since then, I read it whenever I feel like a humorous pick-me-up. Adrian's language envelopes the reader and is, oddly, touching. You can't say that you particularly LIKE Adrian all the time; yet somehow you find yourself cheering him on. Adrian continually shows himself to be ignorant yet still manages to feel that he is intellectually superior to others. Additionally, Adrian's self-absorption is juxtaposed perfectly with his "good samaritanship" (Bert Baxter, anyone?). His parents are immoral, lazy, self-centered and just plain impossible, yet Adrian somehow soldiers on, alternately considering himself an object of pity and a shining example of excellence. I'm looking forward to finding out how Adrian grew up (just found out that there's more books on him!). In the meantime, I would recommend this book to anyone with a sense of humor.

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First Sentence:
These are my New Year's resolutions: 1. I will help the blind across the road. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
menaces money, electric storage heaters, stick insect, rat fink, round tomorrow
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Barry Kent, Bert Baxter, Sue Townsend, Rick Lemon, Miss Elf, Auntie Susan, Courtney Elliot, Doreen Slater, Social Security, Radio Four, Claire Neilson, New Year, Hamish Mancini, John Tydeman, Valentine's Day, Labor Party, Pandora Braithwaite, The Voice of Youth, Domestic Science, Katie Bell, Sharon Botts, British Museum, The Sunday Times, Alderman Cooper Sunshine Home, Auntie Marcia
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