DATING DISASTERS OF EMMA NASH

If Adrian Mole had been a teenage girl, he would have been Emma Nash.

Two months after her boyfriend stopped speaking to her, Emma gets a social media notification: “Leon Naylor is in a relationship with Anna McDonnell.” Emma could have sworn Leon was in fact dating her. Now that she thinks of it, all the signs of a breakup are there, except that Leon (who is assumed white) forgot one important thing: to actually break up with Emma! What’s a girl to do? The white English teenager starts a blog charting her painfully awkward dating woes as she tries to find someone who will help her forget Leon (chucking his used Band-Aid that she keeps under her pillow would be a better place to start). Misguided attempts at moving on lead to one boy disaster after another. Is dating to forget the right thing to do? What’s so important about having a boyfriend anyway? Emma and her friends (white lesbian Faith and dark-skinned soccer player Steph) question society’s rules for girls, but there’s an uncomfortable subtext about the sacredness of virginity that might leave some young feminist readers recoiling. Loaded with Briticisms and told primarily through Emma’s hilariously angst-y blog posts, Seager’s debut is an epistolary novel for the technological age.

Bawdy, irreverent, and embarrassingly truthful.