Girl,15 – Flirting for England

This is the latest in the enormously popular ‘Girl, 15’ series and it is very much the mixture as before with its bubbly heroine, Jess, veering wildly between ecstasy and despair as she negotiates the perils of teenage life. In this title, she has to contend with an invasion of French exchange students. Most of the girls are hosting their female counterparts, but Jess has rashly volunteered to have a boy. Her head is full of Gallic stereotypes and at first her only problem appears to be coming up with a sufficiently glamorous photograph to send Edouard. Her best mate, the endearingly quirky Fred, comes up with a digital solution. The stage looks set fair for romance when Jess receives Edouard’s own photo, which is every bit as adorable as she’d hoped.

Edouard’s actual arrival, complete with Harry Potter glasses, is a crushing disappointment, the first in a series of comic misunderstandings and reversals. It is Jodie’s partner, the handsome, but unreliable Gerard who sets more than one English heart fluttering. Limb is adept at scene-setting and cheerfully packs her key characters off on a camping trip in the middle of the country to bring tensions to a head. If the result is predictable on some levels, with an obligatory storm, rampaging cows and jealous girly tantrums, there are always just enough surprises for the reader.

Within the broad-brush conventions of the chick-lit genre, there is gentle development in Jess’s perceptions of Edouard – she moves from a gradual and intermittent awareness of his difficulties as a foreigner in her house and country to a respect for his practical abilities at camp. Neat endings are resisted, however, as both Fred and Edouard realistically retain those characteristics which make it impossible for Jess to view either of them as romantic possibilities at this stage of her development. Instead she falls for the school sporting hero, arriving late on the scene, a clear cue-in for a sequel. Full of empathy and good humour (although I could have done with less of the toilet variety, which seems aimed at a younger readership) this is a perfect teen light read.