Rae Earl

Considering how obsessed I was (and still am) with Louise Rennison’s Confessions of Georgia Nicholson series I can’t quite believe that the real-life diaries of Rae Earl never crossed my path. Fictional teenagers are fab, but reading Rae’s diaries is even more poignant because the stories are true to her life experiences (or at least only minorly altered for the sake of anonymity and the logical progression of the story). I watched the tv show that came from these books last year, and even though the show has a very distinct style that relies on the medium of film, the book series was clearly a huge influence since Rae’s voice comes through regardless of the medium. Her weird mind (and I do not mean weird in a bad sense) is definitely unique, especially from many of the other teenage diarists that I’ve read, so I was happy to see so much cross-pollination and Rae’s true self shining through! Can’t wait to read the second book and see how Rae deals with all of the drama of growing up - boys, bitchy friends, her silly mother, A-levels, and of course her complex relationship with food and herself.… (more)

I didn’t think it was possible, but the second Rae Earl book was even better than the first! It has a lot of the same themes (Rae struggling with her troubled mind, her obsession with Haddock, not knowing what is next in her life, the importance of music, etc), but we see her grow so much more in this book. She finishes her A-levels, and while I’m not entirely sure that it matches with high school graduation in North America, there is a definite feeling of Rae having to evaluate different schools to attend in the next year and feeling very unhappy when she’s kind of forced into going to Essex (and eventually dropping out to work for a year, and then applying to go to Hull). The narrative isn’t as neat as many other “figuring out post-high school life” narratives that I’ve read, but for all that it makes Rae more of a real person. Life isn’t as simple as being able to mentally cope with being away from home or not, and Rae demonstrates that perfectly when she realizes quite quickly that she hates Essex, but absolutely loves Hull, and when she has to leave a friend road trip early, but is totally fine going to Poland for a month. The situations on the surface seem like they would be analogous, but in reality it’s all about circumstances, triggers, and having the right feeling about a place or group of people to actually make a difference. It’s almost too bad that Rae stopped publishing her diaries after this one (and apparently burned the originals), since her story is fascinating, but the final moments of this diary drive home her central message: life is fucked up, and we’re all fucked up, but we figure out ways to cope so that we can be happy on a larger scale.… (more)