Book Review: Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging

Title: Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging

Author: Louise Rennison

Publisher: Harper Collins

Date: 1999

ISBN: 0-06-667227-2

Length: 247 pages plus preview of the sequel

Quote: “I don’t see why I can’t have a lock on my bedroom door…people start shaking their heads and tutting. It’s like living in a house full of chickens.”

Which just may be what’s wrong with Georgia Nicolson. Something certainly is. This caricature of adolescent shallowness, moodiness, selfishness, ignorance, and vanity apparently passes tests on school subjects, and plays tennis, but all she admits ever thinking about are sex, self, and acting like a spoilt brat at school—wearing the school uniform “wrong,” slipping on fake noses for the yearbook picture, and similar feeble jokes. Maybe solitude is what she needs to become fully human.

Angus is the cat, allegedly half Scottish wild cat, though thirty-pound throwback cats just come along now and then; in a few breeds, notoriously Manx and Maine Coon, these “giant” cats could almost be described as normal. The ancestors of our pet cats were big efficient predators. Humans deliberately bred them down to a smaller size so they’d be safer to keep as pets. Once in a while a domestic cat reverts to its ancestral size. It starts out as an ordinary kitten and then keeps growing. Angus is housebroken, though otherwise undisciplined. Georgia’s three-year-old sister, Libby (short for Liberty), is not housebroken. Angus chases dogs, slaps and nips full-sized humans, including Georgia especially when she gets ideas about cuddling up with him as if he were the family’s previous cat, but he’s kind to little Libby even when she makes the sort of messes Angus is too mature and responsible to make. Rennison claimed to have lived with a real cat like Angus.

Thongs were the big lingerie fad of the period. Georgia didn’t like them.

Snogging is, well, snogging—smooching, and everything else that occurs to smoochers who don’t keep their hands in their pockets. Such a useful word could hardly be confined to one country, but no worries. Georgia provides detailed descriptions of all of her snogging experiences and most of her friends’.

Georgia has one close friend, Jasmine, whom she sees almost daily and insults habitually, and a horde of school friends, not yet identified as “the ace gang.” (Asexual they’re not, so calling them “the ace gang” sounds sarcastic, like calling them “the nice quiet polite girls.”) 

During their summer vacation Georgia notices Jasmine’s sudden eagerness to go to the grocery store. That’s because Tom, Jasmine’s first boy friend, works there. So does his older brother Robbie, to whom Georgia is attracted. Georgia has even enjoyed a date with Robbie before her fundamental nastiness takes over, and, bored by Jasmine’s infatuation with Tom, Georgia tells Jasmine to dump Tom because Tom wants to run the store when he grows up. Robbie shares Tom’s career goals and retaliates by saying Georgia is too young for him. Among other things this prompts Georgia to plead that she’s actually fifteen but was “kept back” because she’s “not bright.” 

All we really need to know about this relationship is that the next volume in the series is called On the Bright Side I’m Now the Girlfriend of a Sex God, but fear it not, Georgia will tell us much more. Let’s just say that Jasmine, the boys, the rest of the “ace gang” and their dates, are all about as empty-headed as Georgia and Georgia’s descriptions, which alternate between cliché and clever, may cause malfunctions of the coffee and food processing systems if read at table.

If you like laughing at, rather than with, a character who is likely to make the teenagers you know seem comparatively rational, you will probably like the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series. Rennison kept audiences, at least in the UK, laughing at Georgia all the way through Georgia’s adolescence and then started on Georgia’s younger relatives, right up to Rennison’s own untimely demise.

What’s not to like? Sometimes I wish there’d been a book of Confessions of Jasmine, in which Georgia’s lifelong verbal punching bag discusses the insecurities that kept her putting up with Georgia for so long, what finally woke her up, and how she paid Georgia back. There’s not one, so far as I know. The possibility that Rennison’s books might give some teenager the idea that verbal abuse is part of a long-term friendship would bother me if the people who bought these books from me were teenagers.