Editing Emma: The Secret Blog of a Nearly Proper Person

This highly contemporary novel has much to say about teenage relationships, friendship and identity. Emma’s boyfriend Leon `ghosted’ her, ie. simply stopped seeing her and began a relationship with someone else. Emma, inconsolable, closets herself in her bedroom in her pyjamas and stalks him through his social media accounts, obsessing about their time together and cherishing her tiny collection of memorabilia from their relationship: a blood-stained plaster which Leon once used and the wrappers from the Chewit sweets which he shared with her. There are real shades of the late, great Louise Rennison here, though the humour is not always as sharply and hilariously focused. However, Emma’s misery is real and credible and her friends rally round to support her, though not always achieving what they aim to do. There is a seam of well-handled farce in the bedrock of the narrative, too, which complements Emma’s woe and gives it credibility.

She decides that the cure for her sadness is to meet someone else on line-hence the accidental discovery of her mother’s Tinder profile, and a ‘date’ with a fellow pupil whose only interests are computer technology and packets of Minstrels. Alongside the slapstick humour Seager raises issues which are of real relevance to young people – finding a place in society, being gay, family problems, handling friendships, finding an identity. Emma finds hers when, at her mother’s suggestion she begins to develop her talent for making clothes and realises that when she does this she not only likes herself much better but also realises that she does not need to be part of a couple in order to define herself.

With these discoveries Emma makes new resolutions about how she uses the internet and how she assesses her self-worth. These are in the form of a list and so give a rather rushed feel to the ideas, a shame, as much of the rest of the book is carefully considered.