Namedropper

by Emma Forrest

Book Overview

Meet Viva Cohen: her bedroom walls are plastered with posters of silver-screen legends, and underneath her school uniform she wears vintage thigh-high stockings. Her best friends are a drugged-out... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684865386
• ISBN13: 9780684865386
• Release Date: August 2000
• Publisher: Touchstone Books
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Please buy this book

Namedropper is an elegantly written, pitch-perfect and hypermodern coming-of-age tale. It bodes well for the future of hip, yet literate and readable fiction.

Fun, engrossing and poignant read!

I absolutely loved this book! I was so impressed with Viva Cohen, the protaganist--her style, her wit, her intelligence, her drive--and yet I could also relate to her more vulnerable qualities--feeling a little too plump, falling in love for the first TWO times, loving and hating your best friend all at once, caring about pop culture more than school. The plot is very gripping and moves speedily along but the charm of this novel is in Viva and who she is as a character. A lot of people have compared Emma Forrest's writing style with Nick Hornby's and while that is somewhat accurate, calling her the "Jane Austen of the techno-generation," (though Viva has more of a thing for Don Henley than techno) as Diane Leslie said in a review is not so far-fetched. This book is really in the same vein of another wonderful book I gulped down, Dodie Smith's *I Capture the Castle*. That one also documents the coming-of-age of a wryly intelligent, hyper-observant young Brit, Cassandra Mortmain, though that story was written in and takes place in the 1930's. And as for the "Bridget Jones," comparisons, Bridget was ok but Viva is just fantastic.

One of my Summer's Most Enjoyable Reads

I picked this book up as an impulse purchase and I was delighted to discover a great light read with substance. (How often can you say that!?) Emma Forrest has a sharp, slightly absurd sense of humor and created many rambunctious, well developed and endearing characters. There is nothing about this book that feels unoriginal and it was refreshing to read an introspective and intelligent portrayal of a teenage girl, especially in the wake of the one-dimensional female characterisations (see Bridget Jones) that I've come across all too often lately. My only complaint is that after finishing the novel, I discovered that this is Forrest's only published work!!

Prodigious

This is the IT read of the season, but don't let that stop you, or be the reason you read it. A hip, dishy novel, it is much more profound and thoughtful than the early reviews suggest. The breezy style might remind some of Nick Hornby, but this is a richer, more layered, more multidimensional novel, funny with genuine poignancy. The author is 23, the book was published in the Uk when she was 22, which means she wrote it when she was around 20, but it has none of the self-conscious hipness or mawkishness of most young novelists. SVH

Live Forever

Like the song that makes the teenage narrator want to die and live forever at the same time, this novel hits hard. While proving an easy and pleasurable (and often hilarious) read, the story poses profound questions about the nature of friendship and celebrity, and the meaning of it all. The remarkably strong narrative voice leaves me curious to learn more about the British author and particularly to find out just how autobiographical the perfectly-formed main character and story are. I hope that more publicity is to follow. Anyway, I challenge you to put this book down once you've got started - and I bet you won't be able to resist continuing to the wonderful, unexpected finale.