Undiscoverd Gyrl

I'm not exactly sure what I really liked about this book. It could be the realism portrayed in Katie, the gossipy nature, the connection with blogging, the draw into Katie's emotional roller-coaster, the epistolary format (blogging dates), the secondary characters, the humor, the risky behavior, the fact that I learned to like Katie, etc. In truth, I think it's a little bit of everything.

What I didn't like was the s*x scenes. I don't believe that all the details needed to be spelled out. However, after a while I felt like I knew Katie, so her behavior became expected and accepted . . . because that was Katie, and she was the one telling the story. (I remembered that it was a book after all, so it was okay to accept it from a fictional character.) Anyway, I was always looking for the good in her and hoping for the best for her.

This was quite a book. I am left with many emotions (just finished it) and sadly think that it's probably a very scary truth.

Originally posted on: Thoughts of Joy ( )

This is a difficult review to write. While I liked the book a lot it was still different.
I liked it because it was written in blog form. I have read books written like diaries but never blogs.
Some other things I liked is that the author makes you feel for Katie. She is a troubled teen who drinks, smokes, has a bad relationship with her father, and sleeps with older men. You can't help but feel sorry for her.
Saying this, there are some things in the book that were very bold and detailed. Like Katie's language got rauncy once in a while, and her sex life is explained. And even though Katie is a teenager I wouldn't think that this book would be for a young reader.
And I did not see the ending coming. It ends with Katie's last blog post as:

"Wait, phone ringing. Someboday loves me. Stand by."

I'm not going to say who picks up Katie's blog from here because I don't want to give anything away. But I have to say that I was not expecting the ending. And I am also still wondering what exactly happened. I wish the ending would have been a little different. ( )

Katie decides to take a year off before she starts college and documents this time in a blog. Undiscovered Gyrl is that blog. It reads a lot like a diary in that it is a first person account in dated entries and since it is an anonymous blog it is filled with thoughts and actions that probably would not usually be shared. This setting, though, allows for some interaction between Katie and the people who email or leave comments and I think her response to them is sometimes even more telling than the blog entries themselves. Katie is blunt and at time even crude. Her life is filled with sex and alcohol and other self destructive behavior and sometimes you want to shake her and make her see what she is doing. Other times you want to slap her because she seems to see what she is doing to herself but she just doesn’t stop. But at the same time you can’t help but feel for Katie because you can also see the hurt and pain. Burnett does a good job of creating a voice for Katie and keeping true to it so Katie sounds natural and believable and it is not hard to see Katie as real and to quickly become involved in her story. It is a fast read, not because it is light subject matter but, because the story is engrossing and somehow you find that you can’t look away. The ending leaves you with a lot of questions. Not just about the future but about the past as well. It is the kind of ending that some people will love and others will hate. I honestly don’t know if I like the ending or not. In a way I feel gypped because I felt like we were getting to know Katie and then, well, suddenly not, but I definitely did not see it coming and it had me thinking about it long after I closed the book, two things that I think are good in an ending and often hard to achieve. ( )

Undiscovered Gyrl was sent to me as a review book. Katie has just finished High School and has decided she is not ready to begin college. With some advice she decides that she need to document her time with a journey, but instead of keeping a record of her journey through writing she decides to keep a blog that details the highlights of her life. At this point I still felt this story had awesome potential, but once I began delving into this story I was quickly let down. The story is a long drawn out process of a young girl gone wild. Many teens have a point in their lives where they go a little crazy with immaturity, and show some true colors for a little bit of time. Most of the book was a steady stream of what I considered boring dialog, and it felt as though the story was lacking a direction. The portion of this story that I found exceptionally interesting was the last few page of Katie's Mothers blog entries. All in all this story was very unsetlling which could enormously have to do with that I have pressed past this point in my life, and now as a Mother it is a nightmare to think that sooner rather than later may children could be going through a life patch such as this. ( )

Publisher: Only on the internet can you have so many friends and be so lonely.
Beautiful, wild, funny, and lost, Katie Kampenfelt is taking a year off before college to find her passion. Ambitious in her own way, Katie intends to do more than just smoke weed with her boyfriend, Rory, and work at the bookstore. She plans to seduce Dan, a thirty-two-year-old film professor.

Katie chronicles her adventures in an anonymous blog, telling strangers her innermost desires, shames, and thrills. But when Dan stops taking her calls, when her alcoholic father suffers a terrible fall, and when she finds herself drawn into a dangerous new relationship, Katie's fearless narrative begins to crack, and dark pieces of her past emerge.

Sexually frank, often heartbreaking, and bursting with devilish humor, Undiscovered Gyrl is an extraordinarily accomplished novel of identity, voyeurism, and deceit.

My Thoughts: I started reading undiscovered gyrl thinking it would be a simple, quick read entertaining but somewhat immature for an adult. I expected to read a story that taught a lesson or attempted to instill values and morals, with some of the hokiness of an after school special, in young adults. Well, you know what they say about assuming something.. .ahem! ...well, jus don't! I never read YA Fiction before now but I certainly will after reading this book.

An undiscovered gyrl is a young girl who doesn’t feel valued, who feels she isn't noticed or is ignored by the world around her. She thinks if she vanished tomorrow nobody would notice. She’ll say that she doesn't want to be noticed but she craves attention for the person she is not the person she appears to be. She fears being forgotten. An undiscovered girl has a family but her family members are wrapped up in their own lives. She is selfish partly because she feels like nobody really wants to know her true self.. She likes to dramatize her life and often over-reacts to even the smallest issues to get attention. An undiscovered girl is insecure and self-conscious because she feels unloved. It's common for her to do whatever it takes to get attention, even if the attention makes her feel badly about herself afterwards. An undiscovered girl is a lost, lonely young girl aching for someone to love her unconditionally and tell her it's okay to be herself. Katie is all of these things and so much more. Katie Kampenfelt is an undiscovered girl like so many female teenagers.

I didn't like or dislike this book. "Like" is too simple a concept for how this book made me feel. Few books have cause me to experience the range of emotions I felt while reading undiscovered gyrl. At different times anger, disgust, sadness, pride, compassion, pity, laughter, aggravation, revulsion and fear coursed through me. Katie made me laugh, scream, grit my teeth, groan and smile intermittently. While reading the bits and pieces of her life she shared, Katie, the main character, appeared insecure and self-conscious like so many young girls today. But she's also arrogant, very intelligent and scared. She makes many poor decisions out of a desire to be loved and doesn't completely grasp the difference between unconditional love and being loved for what you can provide another person such as sex.. Katie's insecurity is partly the result of poor, selfish parenting and lack of attention. Glimpses of the sad little girl who just wants her daddy's love tugged at my heart strings but the drinking, drugging obnoxious Katie annoyed me.

The blog entries that comprise undiscovered gyrl seduce the readers into believing they have an intimate, personal relationship with Katie. Reading her most personal thoughts and being privy to the details of her life feeds the voyeuristic tendencies most of us possess and that have made reality shows so popular. But in actuality we only know what Katie decides to tells us and what she wants us to think or know about her. Katie's flair for the dramatic, common to many teenage girls, enables her to shock people from which she gets significant enjoyment. The jarring, sometimes unbelievable entries that attract numerous and critical readers to Katie's blog, undermines the verity of what she says. Many of the numerous themes that are introduced don't come to fruition because Katie is directing the storyline. The reader is left with a sense of loss which also begs the question of whether we can believe Katie.

Once I started reading this book, it was difficult to put down. As much as several of Katie's blog entries made me cringe while others disgusted me, Katie definitely got under my skin. I was rooting for her halfway though the book. I was extremely disappointed by the end of this book for many different reasons. But that's all I'm going to say about that!.

I think this is an especially good book for the parents of a young girl or anyone who is caring for a young girl because it touches on so many of the issues young girls confront growing up in the world today. It's also a good book for older teenagers, for some it may even serve as a wake-up call. Katie is smart, beautiful and wants to be loved. She has so much potential. But she seems to be teetering on the edge, about to plunge into the dark side. She needs someone to grab her up, hug her, ease her insecurities and tell her it's going to be okay before it's too late. The same goes for so many young girls today. ( )