Mathilda Savitch Book

I bought this book based on the first sentence, where Mathilda tells the audience that she has decided to be awful. The prose was poetic and wonderful at first, and I expected to luxuriate in the language of this book and savor it, but it was all downhill after the first couple of chapters. Not only does the prose become less poetic, but the story kind of sucks. I mean, I can believe that a teenage girl would think along the lines that Mathilda does, or that she would construct the inner world that she does, but the story just seems to deteriorate more and more until it just crumbles at the end. I don't want to spoil the story by giving details. It didn't work for me.

The other thing that bothered me was`the glaring mistakes the author made when he constructed the dialogue and sexual perception of the teenage girl characters in the novel. The mistakes I found might seem subtle, but to me they really stuck out. Like, when one of the girls has her first period, she tells Mathilda that she's "bleeding." I've never actually heard a young girl refer to her periods in this way, although I can imagine that some girls do. I was taught to call it my period, and I've only ever heard men say "bleeding," so when the girl tells her friend she's bleeding I thought she must have injured herself somehow. But Mathilda knows exactly what she's talking about, which I wouldn't have at that age. I also think the author could have benefited from asking an actual woman what certain sexual experiences feel like from the female perspective. These are things that might not bother another person, but to me they made it difficult to suspend my disbelief because the scenes felt like something a man made up to imagine what a girl might feel, rather than the reality. Despite the horrible story, I think the author still would have been better off leaving out the girls' observations about their developing bodies and their first sexual explorations, because it just didn't ring true. If I'd had the chance to talk to this author before he turned in the script, I would have advised him to write the book from the POV of a teenage boy and just scrap the idea of trying to get into the mind of a teenage girl.