Girl Online On Tour, Zoe Sugg - book review: May the froth be with you
Penguin - £12.99
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Your support makes all the difference.It doesn’t matter what I write here. I could compose an existential critique of my weekly shopping receipt and Girl Online On Tour would probably still be at the top of the bestseller charts. Author Zoe Sugg is 25, and while I’m not entirely sure how old her parents are, the chances are that I am either the only over-45-year-old to read this, or at least a member of a very exclusive club. Sugg is better known as Zoella, the insanely popular YouTube vlogger who posts videos of her daily life and who has a reach into children’s lives that has set brand marketing consultants drooling in a quite unseemly fashion.
Her first novel, Girl Online, was the biggest selling fiction debut since records began. Author Siobhan Curham apparently “helped” with book one. Did Zoella’s fans care? Not a bit.
Girl Online was about Penny Porter, a Brighton-based teen who blogged under the titular pseudonym. Her secret identity was busted, she went to New York and fell in love with a budding pop-star, Noah Flynn (I haven’t read it, unfortunately – synopsis courtesy of my daughter Alice, about to turn 11).
Girl Online On Tour picks up straight after the first book. Penny has scrapped her blog, now writing only privately for a few friends. She is the official girlfriend of rising star Noah, who is embarking on a world tour as support for a boy-band. And Penny gets to go with him.
Curiously, 16-year-old Penny’s parents hardly bat an eye at this, but never fear. Despite being on the road with a pair of testosterone-fuelled bands she doesn’t touch a drop of alcohol nor get beyond a bit of chaste cuddling in her hotel rooms. Penny is a good girl. She is from Brighton and has the lovely sort of middle-class life where her mother dances around the kitchen to Strictly with Penny’s gay best friend.
Quite how this tale of Brighton suburbia goes down in the high-rises or the council estates is anyone’s guess. It pitches to be Judy Blume and comes off more like Enid Blyton, albeit liberally sprinkled with mentions of Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat. Does that make it a bad book? Not at all. It’s competently written in cliffhanger episodes, full of heart, and sends out the right message – you can’t live in someone else’s shadow, and have to make the most of your own talents.
There are better Young Adult books out there, but if Zoe Suggs gets the YouTube generation into reading, then dismissing this as superficial froth would feel a bit like kicking a particularly wide-eyed and enthusiastic puppy.
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