Book Review - Secret Scribbled Notebooks by Joanne Horniman

Reading Secret Scribbled Notebooks by Joanne Horniman I felt cheeky accidently picking up Kate’s private diaries.  Joanne does a great job of getting into Kate’s head to be able to divulge all of her inner most thoughts.  Horniman uses four points of view (three notebooks and typewritten pages) in addition to using the first person narrative enabling the reader to develop a close relationship to Kate, the seventeen year old narrator.  One of Kate’s notebooks is written as more of a fantasy of herself in third person.

 

Joanne uses a technique of a number of different notebooks (coloured yellow, red and blue) for Kate to divulge different secrets and thoughts.  The majority of the story however is written on The Wild Typewritten Pages (which we find out later she wrote with hindsight once she was given a typewriter). 

Kate is at point at transition point in her life wanting to make big decisions for herself.  She is thinking about love and what it means, and about home and where that is.   She is ready to explore these big themes as she finishes up her final year at school. 

I read it with a little scepticism about the truth in the story when it is delivered by Kate in her wild typewritten pages and notebooks as this technique allows the unreliable narrator to sneak through.  At points I also wondered about the idea of using so many different notebooks to tell the story. 

Having said all of that, Joanne Horniman writes a great story that takes us, the reader, into the mind of a girl in transition.  She takes us on a journey with Kate and we are given her inner most secrets along the way.  I was taken back to my own years of transition and the diaries I kept.

Have you read this and what did you think?

If you kept diaries as a teenager did you explore these issues and did anyone else ever get their hands on the diaries?