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From: teen fiction Category: Books Date: 20 April 2008 Time: 05:39 AM Review: This is one of the freshest books I have read in a long while. The characters have remained in my head and I even scour the second hand shops for more gg titles. A melancholy view of lost adolescence combined with the acute attention to surface detail, every possible description includes brand and advertising type copy is used to make things as grounded in time and place as possible, most books avoid brand-names (ok not American Psycho and that is one of the main influences here) as though we can describe the world in eternal terms, when our experience of it full of capitalism's phrases. The fabulously rich and beautiful protagonists are of course not entirely happy and compete for the same boy's attention who simultaneously is withdrawing from the world with a growing fanatical interest in marijuana, the inedible in pursuit of the ineffable or something. Even the intitially annoying internetty formatted bits of gossip where the characters are refererred to by their initials helps to cement their identities and names in the reader's poorly focussed brain. Yes the books are standard teen fantasy (I wish I were them) and as an adult reading them, there is a pervy element to reading descriptions of teenagers nearly having sex, but the characters and their lives remain and stay to haunt the imagination. You know you love me.