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Title: The Following Girls

Author: Louise Levene

Narrator: Louise Levene

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins

Language: English

Release date: 02-13-14

Publisher: Whole Story Audiobooks

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

School, the happiest days of your life? Not for Amanda Baker, 16 and sick of it as she moves miserably between lessons. Her only solace is her fifth form gang - the four Mandies - and a low-calorie diet of king-sized cigarettes, until she teams up with Julia Smith, games captain and consummate game player. So begins a passionate friendship that will threaten her future, menace her sanity, and risk the betrayal of everything and everyone she holds dear.

Members Reviews:

'St Trinian's for grown-ups'

I really enjoyed this novel - a bit of light reading but one which really evokes the memories of being a teenager back in the 70s. School, friendships, a future career, family problems are all part of the life of the main character, Amanda Baker. A rebellious 15 year old, who with her friends delights in breaking rules and organising pranks, Amanda can see the pettiness of school life...

(spoiler alert) The author's epigraph: "The Hate had started", is taken from George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'. We learn that Amanda is studying Orwell, and Levene very loosely structures her novel around that work. Amanda is a latter-day Winston Smith, making a stand against authority - there's even a friend and co-conspirator, Julia - but will medicine and drugs bring her into line?

Very enjoyable but doesn't really seem to go anywhere, so more of a *3.5.

Going back to school!

The Following Girls does not refer to girls who follow someone or something. It is instead a very schoolmarmish quote often heard in school classrooms and assemblies, eg - 'Will the following girls please step out of line?' or 'The following girls have been selected for the school play' and so on.

This book is a story about a particular girl's life in an English girls school in the 70's, not very difficult to relate to even today. Malory towers it is not. For starters it is not residential and for another the students and teachers seem to exist in a perpetual state of war. Our protagonist is called Amanda Baker, aka Baker, and is friends with 3 other girls also named Amanda. The four Mandies are pretty notorious in school and a constant source of pain to their teachers who have been dying to find a reason to expel at least one of them to make an example.

Baker's mother left her with her father when she was but 5 years old and she grew up with him and his new wife. Mr. Baker is utterly conventional and incapable of looking at his daughter without seeing his first wife. He is so caught up in the wrongs that were done to him that he deciphers every action of his daughter as a deliberate attempt to hurt him. At times I felt sad for him, so caught up in conventionality, so afraid of what people might think and at times so angry for failing to love this child of his.

Amanda is an intelligent girl and quite good at her studies. She doesn't commit any great mistakes and I felt great sympathy for her when she is caught wearing the wrong shoes for gym and is terrified that the teachers will inform her father. I mean that is such a pathetic thing to call parents for and an even more pathetic thing for the child to be scared about it. If someone had called my Dad that I was wearing the wrong shoes in school, he would have laughed it off like he did every time the teachers told him that I talked too much in every single school and every single parent-teacher meet he ever went to.