My Year In Agony

Book excerpt: Sixteen year-old Anya Buxton has been transferred from her fee-paying school to the local comp. Her parent's acrimonious divorce has left them strapped for cash, and Anya is forced to adapt to her new school life. Deciding to keep her head down and her opinions to herself every day, Anya distracts herself from a chaotic home life and warring parents by becoming the school's anonymous Agony Aunt on the newsletter website. Her fabulous powers of observation and perception along with a no-nonsense attitude and sometimes caustic wit, makes a big impact on the pupils who write in with their problems. Miss Understanding tells it like it is, and doesn't pull any punches and on the whole delivers wise, and often hilariously brutal advice, along with a few sage observations about her fellow pupils and the teachers at the Academy. Stirred by her irreverance, the school chucks her off the offical website, but undeterred, Miss Understanding simply sets up her own, along with a regular blog for her readers' entertainment. She is articulate and riveting reading and the problems continue to flood in. But gradually Anya's feelings about her home life, her frustration with her mother and with her father's new wife begin to bias her writing and her responses to problems, and the readers begin to form a picture of who Ms Understanding really is. Consequently, when she inadvertently raises questions and issues of her own in her blog, her readers start to chip in with advice of their own on how she should cope with and adjust to all the changes in her life. All this is executed in a consistently funny and wry narrative, and reveals a unique and strong new character in chick lit genre for teens.