Review: The Carrie Diaries

The Carrie Diaries by Candace Bushnell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Very standard YA. I might even have liked it more had the main character NOT been Carrie Bradshaw, because I do not like her as an adult. I've seen my fair share of Sex and the City, of course, but Carrie is my least fave character on the show and her "column" and what we see of it is incredibly stupid. I've always had a hard time believing anyone would want to read that.

Now we get to see Carrie as a teen, an she's pretty boring, and her story even more so. You can guess pretty much everything that's going to happen from the first page or so. I mean, one guy is introduced as being just like one of the girls and whaddyaknow, turns out he's gay. It's that kind of subtble foreshadowing throughout the book.

At least Carrie's friends were not complete carboncopies of the SatC characters. Sure, there are similarities. Maggie = Charlotte, Roberta/Mouse = Miranda, Walt = Carrie's gay bff whose name I can't remember (Stanley??) ... and I guess there are some similarities between Lali and Samantha, but of course Samantha would never be such a bitch, especially not towards Carrie, so I guess that's where it fell apart. It could've been worse on that front, at least.

I did like that she didn't end up with any guy at the end, but I also rolled my eyes really hard at all the things hinting at what's to come in Carrie's life, about always needing a boyfriend and how she hopes she'll be strong enough to not be in a relationship with some asshole later on. Good luck with that.

Honestly, I liked the Sex and the City book, because it actually did somewhat deal with being single and stuff, but I didn't enjoy this too much nor did I like Lipstick Jungle (lol, wasn't that also a TV show for a while?), so I'm not sure Candance Bushnell is actually a good writer. I think she just got lucky once.

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True story.