Undiscovered Gyrl: The novel that inspired the movie ASK ME ANYTHING (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

Burnett, Allison

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307473120 ISBN 13: 9780307473127

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009

Synopsis

Beautiful, outspoken, funny and wild, Katie Kampenfelt is as reckless as she is intelligent. Taking a year off before college, she intends to do more than smoke weed with her boyfriend, Rory and work at the bookshop. She plans to discover her passion and seduce Dan, the 32 year-old professor she watches movies with. She confesses the details of her life online, changing her name to avoid recognition, responding to readers replies with bristley insults. But when Dan ignores her and her father falls ill, her bravado cracks and dark pieces of her past emerge.

About this title

Review:

"[Katie's] raw, young voice describing the sordid situations she finds herself in-seeks out, really-is authentic teenage girl. . . . Intensely self-aware, angry, alienated and filled with teenage narcissism and pain. . . . When the ending kicks in with a twist . . . it forces you to realize you lost yourself in the plot and character and read for pleasure. This makes you complicit in the consequences, turns you into a reader, yes, but also into one of Katie's voyeurs." -Los Angeles Times

"Allison Burnett has magically brewed an addictive elixir. Blogging, self-absorption, and bad behavior slowly build into a touching and deeply moving narrative, yet Burnett chooses to serve this concoction unadorned, a shot of vodka-all the better to feel the ending's burn. If you've ever been tempted to dismiss the next generation, read this book." --Amanda Boyden, author of Pretty Little Dirty and Babylon Rolling

"Imagine an 18-year-old Lolita, updated to the 21st century, blogging her own provocative adventures. By turns charming and crude, disturbingly reckless and achingly tender, Undiscovered Gyrl seduces you into her downy arms, locks her long legs around your waist and doesn't let go. Shot through with teenage yearning for 'true love, ' each page vibrates with the quicksilver spirit of youth. As we follow the narrator on her ever-darkening journey, questions arise about voyeurism and identity in an age of cyber-anonymity. Allison Burnett's masterful page-turner lingers long after the last page." --Rachel Resnick, author of Love Junkie

About the Author:

Allison Burnett is a screenwriter in LA and the author of Christopher, a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, and The House Beautiful.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0307473120
• ISBN 13: 9780307473127
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304