The Brittanys
A Novel
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Bursting with bittersweet nostalgia, a funny, poignant, perfectly voiced debut that captures what it's like to be a teenage girl—“full of brilliantly-rendered awkwardness and the hilarious minor horrors of a privileged adolescence, The Brittanys shimmers with the everyday incandescence of youth” (Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light).
They're not the most popular freshmen at their Florida prep school, but at least everyone knows their name(s). The Brittanys.
Brittany Rosenberg: drives her golf cart around her subdivision to meet boys.
Brittany Gottlieb: insists you can't lose your virginity if you haven't gotten your period. (She heard it somewhere!)
Brittany Tomassi: is from New York.
Brittany Jensen: once threw her tampon into a stranger's swimming pool. A brash, bold, unapologetic tomboy. And the greatest person in the whole wide world.
At least as far as the fifth Brittany--our narrator--is concerned. Even within their friend group, she and Jensen are a duo: with their matching JanSport backpacks, Tiffany chokers, and Victoria's Secret push-up bras, they are unstoppable. And now that they're finally growing up, they're going to do everything: dye their hair, attend no-parent parties, try pot . . . maybe even lose their virginities. 2004 is totally going to be their year!
Except Jensen's interests may be diverging from her friends'. And within our narrator's own family--in the lives of her exhausted mother and beloved, genius older brother--life-changing events may be taking shape. Events that only years later, looking back, she has the perspective to see.
A VINTAGE ORIGINAL
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ackerman (The Perpetual Motion Machine) follows the travails of a group of five high school freshman girls named Brittany in this heartfelt if flat story. The two closest Brittanys, Brittany Jensen and the narrator, are tumbling through adolescence—dyeing their hair for Halloween, wearing Victoria's Secret push-up bras, carrying trendy Coach purses—but as the narrator explores her developing sexuality, Brittany Jensen accuses her of being boy crazy. Now without her best friend, the narrator dips into the dating pool, seeing one boy who neglects to say he has a girlfriend and another too timid to kiss her. When Brittany's birthday comes around and none of the other Brittanys participate in the celebration, the narrator begins to wonder if losing one's childhood friends is an inevitable part of growing up. Unfortunately, only the two main Brittanys receive more than surface-level treatment, and sections told from a later-in-life perspective add little to the story. Though the skimpy plot reads as true to life and the elements of nostalgia are spot-on, the narrative fails to get off the ground. Fans of coming-of-age novels will have seen better.
