The Notebook Girls: Four Friends, One Diary - Softcover

Julia Baskin, Lindsey Newman, Sophie Pollitt-Cohen, and Courtney Toombs live in New York City.

To newly minted ninth graders, high school can seem overwhemingly big and scary. So Julia Baskin, Lindsey Newman, Sophie Pollitt-Cohen and Courtney Toombs thought up a way to make theirs, Stuyvesant High School in New York City, feel a little smaller. They bought a notebook and took turns writing to each other -- sort of a Sisterhood of the Traveling Composition Book, if you will. Two years and several notebooks later, the result is The Notebook Girls: Four Friends. One Diary. Real Life (Warner; paperback, $22.95). (When Pollitt-Cohen's father learned of the notebooks, he saw potential for publication and suggested the girls get in touch with an agent; their idea had garnered them a book deal.) Crafted to look like an actual notebook (down to its mottled, black-and-white cover), the book is almost compulsively readable -- a breezy, voyeuristic delight packed with the four friends' true tales of their high school experiences, from break-ups and make-ups to cute teachers and downright ugly chemistry grades. The girls' handwriting, interspersed with doodles and photos, can be almost illegible. And what they have to say may prove hard for some parents to read. Different ones of the four drink, smoke, swear, do drugs and have sex, and they aren't afraid of getting down and dirty with the details. "Yeah so alcohol rocks my world," muses Courtney. There's Sophie getting caught with marijuana in a public playground; Lindsey's drunken weekend at her sister's college; the Jewish youth group event where Julia engages in oral sex for the first time. When the friends make a much anticipated pilgrimage to CBGB, the legendary music club, and get turned away at the door, it tak!

es a moment to realize why: They're not all 16 yet.

Many entries are nevertheless mature and insightful, traversing "You hooked up with him?!" terrain to tackle topics such as racism, sexism and sexual orientation. Sept. 11, 2001, looms large in everyone's thoughts, in part because they had to evacuate their school, which was mere blocks from the Twin Towers. "I remember turning around to look back [at the World Trade Center]," Sophie writes, "but it was just a huge cloud of dust."

Still, the passages that resonate the most are those in which the girls act like, well, girls. Sophie draws singer Axl Rose's various alter egos, including "Axl Bows" and "Axl Snows." Julia insists that everyone refer to an "order of business" as an "oob." Courtney, writing about her mother, asks that age-old question: "Why doesn't she just die + leave me alone?" Most of the time, the girls seem as if they're on a race to see who can get to "grown-up" first. Maybe that's why these silly, prototypically teenage moments are so affecting.

Girls Will Be Girls
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