Not a worthy burden to 'Carrie'

If only Candace Bushnell hadn’t burdened her book by calling it The Carrie Diaries. It could have been a regular American teen novel about high school angst, entertaining and believable.   

Instead, by insisting on telling us about the life of Carrie Bradshaw before Sex And The City, when she was a small-town girl with the insecurities and dreams that confound the lives of all teenage girls, Bushnell (who wrote the original column that inspired the show) inhibits her own story and saddles her readers with unnecessary expectations.

As teenage Carrie manoeuvres through her last year of high school before she heads to her beloved New York, she already displays — in keeping with the character of her iconic older self — a humourous streak, a rebel’s eye for fashion, a burgeoning sense of independence and an ambition to become a writer.  

The problem is that this Carrie doesn’t always ring true. When she debates issues of feminism, it seems a bit forced, as if Bushnell was obliged to make her young protagonist behave a certain way so as to pave the way for her future self. It’s unfair to burden a small-town 17-year-old girl with thoughts like: “I still feel a flicker of shame when I think about it. I wanted Mary Gordon Howard to rescue me... I’m not that girl anymore... And I don’t need to be rescued anymore, either.” Isn’t getting through high school enough?

It is only in the breezy portrait she paints of high-school life — Carrie’s quirky group of friends, their random antics, boozy parties, escapades of love and sex — that the author seems at ease.  

Young adults, who are presumably the target audience for this book, are too young to have been caught up in Sex And The City thrill. For them, any fun and real book about high school — with or without Carrie — would have done the trick.

Fans of the show and Carrie will find this a weak attempt at milking a cash cow that has already delivered on all promises, especially since this book is said to be the first in a series.