Review: How to Build a Girl - Caitlin Moran

Before picking up How to Build a Girl, I had never read anything by Caitlin Moran. I have How to Be a Woman on my shelf to be read but I just haven't gotten to it. However, when I heard the premise of this book when it first came out, I knew I had to read it. A girl deciding to rebuild herself, using (almost literally) sex, drugs, and rock n' roll? How cool does that sound?!

I was a patient consumer and waited until I saw it out in paperback to pick it up. I hadn't heard much at all on it, which I loved, because I had no preconceptions on it other than the story sounding bad-ass.

Johanna Morrigan is our main character and we meet her at the age of 14 and follow her through the years until she's about 17. She quite literally decides to rebuild who she is and dabbles in music journalism, drugs, sex, and trying to be everything she thinks she should be. We follow her on this journey and meet her family, her coworkers, musicians she's pissed off, and some of the boys she's acquired during her "Lady Sex Adventures." (My most favorite phrase in the whole book). Things don't go how she expects and she realizes she may have built herself with a major flaw.

I'm happy to say that I enjoyed it quite a bit, but it was different than I thought it would be. I expected there to be a hardness and grittiness surrounding Johanna when really, she was one of the funniest, nicest, most awkward female characters I've met. This is definitely a dark story but not because of who Johanna is as a person. Her humor and the way she looked at and analyzed the world and the people around her was so relatable for me. I definitely didn't expect to relate to the main character as much as I did based on the premise of the book. The whole story had much more heart to it than I would have expected as well. References were also really fun in the book. Books, movies, and a plethora of music references were interspersed all throughout the story and the '90s time period with it's grunge was a really great setting surrounding Johanna's experiences.

Overall, I really liked this book a lot. The writing and ideas behind the characters solidified me picking up anything Caitlin Moran writes. After reading the little interview and summary of the author in the back of the book, I feel like Caitlin and I have a lot of the same ideals and she will create characters that I can personally relate to in a way that most authors can't accomplish.