Undiscovered Gyrl by Allison Burnett

Pages: 293

From back-cover:

Only on the Internet can you have so many friends and be so lonely.

• We're all famous in our own minds.
• Complete honesty is a complete lie.
• What's worse than keeping a shameful secret?
• All sex has consequences, most of them dire.
• Don't read my life. Go live your own!

From Undiscovered Gyrl website (I like this one better!):

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.

Review:

Okay, for once I'm going to skip to my own little made-up synopsis. There are four specific words that sum up this story, in a nutshell: crudely honest yet deceitful. Straight-up. The fact that it's written in blog-format is just a bonus, I swear. By the time you get through the first few posts of self-knowing to self-questing, you're hooked. I got a headache from reading straight from the start to page 174. ('Course, that could have been also because it was the middle of the night.) The sexual innuendo is definitely most of the main reason, everything else, random facts. You will laugh at the most saddening parts because you inevitably know what's going to happen next, yet it still manages to catch you by surprise because you sure as hell aren't psychic. Undiscovered Gyrl, I guess you could say is a discovering novel. Makes sense, right? "Kate" remains anonymous throughout, but yet how can she? She's telling a life-story, but is it really hers? You don't know who she is, so....It's riveting and quite appalling at times, a can't look away sort of thing. This might be one of the shortest reviews ever, but no doubt it is one of the best. Book, not review. ;)

I was initially thinking of making this a "crudely honest" review, to portray the fragility of the main character but also the arrogant strength that young adults cannot survive without (which Allison so dearly states, and for that I thank him!).
Hopefully, I can at least go out with a bang! How's this:

Recommended to all YAs out there deferring from their freshman year of college, (males get ready for boners and females, changing of the undies will soon be in order) for you will not stop 'til you pass out from trying to stand up when you've been in your reading position so long--has happened, beware!

Grade: A

Side-Note: Did you know that Miley Cyrus is one of the candidates for the main role in the Undiscovered Gyrl film?? There are nude scenes, people. Are they INSANE? Considering what Allison was before he published Undiscovered Gyrl, it makes sense that it would be a film, right? But couldn't they pick someone, I don't know, older and more sophisticated, I mean DAMN!

LiLi