The Notebook Girls: Four Friends, One Diary [Paperback]

Julia Baskin (Author), Lindsey Newman (Author), Sophie Pollitt-Cohen (Author), Courtney Toombs (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 13, 2006

Everyone likes to think they started the notebook. Sophie claims she stole the idea from two girls in her math class. Courtney still has a death grip on the theory that the notebook was her invention. Lindsey doesn't really care; she's just along for the ride. And Julia never knows what's going on anyway.What we do know is that we started the notebook in freshman year at Stuyvesant High School as a way to keep in contact when our conflicting schedules denied us one another's company. It allowed us to express ourselves and our views of the world in a tone of complete sarcasm, obscenity, and blind honesty. We've spent a significant portion of our adolescence trying to figure out who we are. The notebook is the closest we've come.We're just a group of normal girls with normal lives. Our notebook is meant to make you laugh and make you remember.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–In 2002, during the second half of their freshman year at Manhattan's Stuyvesant High School, four girls began to keep a shared notebook that served as a joint diary and a compendium of letters to one another. Edited only by the authors during the writing and initial reading process, the volume serves as a front-row seat on those aspects of the teens' lives that they deemed interesting or important enough to record. The reproduction of the notebook maintains their handwriting as well as photocopies of the snapshots, sketches, and occasional wrappers and other realia they inserted into its pages. Stuyvesant High is a public exam school, and these girls are brainy, well-educated, and conscious of class. Across the years–the notebook ends midway through their junior year–they show themselves to be self-centered, bold, and whiny by turns, as well as insightful, playful, and in possession of the other hallmark moods one expects from contemporary teenage girls in middle-class America. Their behaviors may seem extreme in some parts of the country while equally expected in others: they drink, engage in sex with varying degrees of protection, explore illicit drugs, procrastinate about homework, and are generally free of politically correct speech about any group–whether other or themselves. Their willingness to expose their adolescence to readers makes their story, or combined stories, engrossing. Readers who like Ann Brashares's fiction may also line up to explore the gritty reality presented here.–Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The creators of The Notebook Girls are four contemporary Manhattan teens, who started the notebook as a way to stay connected with each other. The power here is in the raw honesty, and the format--handwritten pages and pasted-in photos--gives even more immediacy. These are girls who speak in bawdy, vulgar language; tease and tell fart jokes; worry about their bodies, their futures, and their friendships; and experiment with drinking, drugs, and sex. These girls share sharp observations and a strong sense of identity. "Who the fuck are these guys?" asks one girl. "Who gave them the right to comment on girls' bodies like that?" The communal format creates more jockeying and joking and less personal revelation than a diary might. But this title offers a fascinating view of what it means, then and now, to grow up female. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 14 and up
  
• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing; First Edition first Printing edition (April 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0446578622
• ISBN-13: 978-0446578622
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 0.9 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #664,019 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

64 of 71 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Dangerous role models for the less priveleged, April 27, 2006

By 

Brandon del Pozo - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Notebook Girls: Four Friends, One Diary (Paperback)

Because one of the names rang a bell, it was a very easy process to find out a little about one of the author's parents. Her mother is a well-known writer for a political magazine, and her father is a famous weekly opinion columnist for what is often regarded as the best newspaper in the country. He has also won several Emmy awards. They both live in a neighborhood where the average two-bedroom apartment sold at the end of last year for $1,020,600 and was 1,170 square feet.

This should dispell any speculation about how this book was able to make its way into print, and suggest that while many New Yorkers wouldn't blink at paying a million dollars for an apartment, the background of at least one of these young authors is anything but typical for the audience the book is being marketed to. This is not a story from average teens to average teens, is a story of hugely priveleged teens behaving badly and selling a recounting of their experiences to average teens.

This is the implicit takeaway: "You can smoke and drink and fool around and still go to a great school, maybe Princeton, and be a great kid otherwise. Kids do crazy stuff but it's all good because we're sharper than you give us credit for, and we'll grow up anyway and we need to learn for ourselves." If only most kids were that fortunate. Yet there is an unwritten preamble: "If you go to the best public high school in the country and come from an affluent background..."

I, too, attended Stuyvesant, and as you might have suspected, Stuy students have been doing the things written about here for decades, so there is certainly nothing false or revelatory about the contents. In this way, the book is useful as a candid document of what kids at a very selective and elite public school do, in fact, do.

The trouble with the book is that it has no context. The girls who do these things have all gone on to great colleges because Stuy is a college-admissions machine and their parents are in a culture that knows exactly how to play the game. Students like these, largely from established, non-immigrant families, see Stuy as the free alternative to the private school they would have gone to anyway.

There has been related talk about the difference between private and public school kids, but to anyone who knows the class angle at work in selective public schools, it is clear that these authors essentially had a private school experience in a public school. They are simply a world apart form the struggling immigrant children who go to Stuy because it's the best way to a decent life. They are, for example, the children of recent pan-Asian immigrants they apparently never smoked up with, but who make up about 60% of the school. A two bedroom apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, might sell for $175,000.

Most of the adolescents who will take the "be young, take chances, do stupid things" message from this book don't have the ability to do all the drinking and smoking these girls did and still keep their lives together and productive. The stable, safe homes and neighborhoods and parents who create an enviroment where the alcohol and drug use can be buffered and safely managed is just not there for them. For some, getting arrested for buying drugs is the beginning of a downward spiral. For others, it is fodder for a story.

Before the book can be put into perspective, the reader should understand Stuyvesant, New York City, and how this is a special case that does not apply to the average person. That his why, in some ways, the book is troubling. The sad truth is that if you are a poor teen who lives in a Brooklyn tenement and makes the choices these girls made, you might very well die there one day, no different or better than when you started.

This is all apart from the fact that this book is another example of adolescents achieving notoriety and fame by making their private lives a central part of their public personae, as the art in itself. Whether it's for money or attention, it's sort of unsettling to think that achieving success in the publishing world has devolved into the artless practice of being a little naughty and then telling the world about it.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting look into life in NY High School, November 4, 2006

By 

Iris Stroma "Iris Stroma" (Saint Louis, MO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Notebook Girls (Paperback)

I enjoyed this book for the relatively honest look at four girls' during their first 2 1/2 years at a magnet high school in NYC. Each girl definitely has their own voice, and goes through their own rebellions, own relationships, and deal with their own periods of maturity. You might flinch at the regular sexual teasing they give each other and their mothers, but in general, all are fairly kind and open-minded as each of them grows and changes.

Some highlights include personal discussions of body image, same-sex relationships, and accepting each other's roles in religious groups. The main negative is the weird change in tone towards the end - it begins to sound as if the writing is being watched by the parents who helped them get published. Obviously, we couldn't read all of this if they hadn't had help getting it published, but in the last fifth or so of the book, there is a change in the subject matter: a decrease in the discussion of drugs and sex, and an increase in flowery reflection on their experiences as friends and their difficult experience on 9/11. Even if unintentional, it feels like a parent is encouraging them to write about heart-tugging situations in wrapping their story up, and frowning over the drug content much earlier in the book.

Teens face choices about sex, drugs, body image, and homework every day, so I would still place this book in young-adult. However, keep in mind that as a diary, it isn't (and shouldn't be) held to literary standards of any work of fiction written about high school. Enjoy it for what it is: a diary shared among four girls trying to be cool and be themselves at the same time, and you'll get a lot out of it.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Kids are All Right!, June 4, 2006

By 

Martie DeJean (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Notebook Girls: Four Friends, One Diary (Paperback)

I really enjoyed this funny and down-to-earth high school diary. Contrary to some of the one-star posters, the girls are not jaded debauchees and the world is not coming to an end. The girls' experiences with pot, alcohol and sex are very normal and have been for decades, even in Jesusland . Could these posters be mad that no one gets pregnant, becomes an addict, drops out or finds Christ? To me, these are four intelligent high-spirited kids who took the trouble to write down all the stuff grownups forget -- from gym and the school play to crushes and debating politics and religion with your best friends.
This would be a great gift for teenagers, to show them they are not alone. If it inspires them to keep a diary of their own, so much the better!