Secret Scribbled Notebooks

Thoughts on Secret Scribbled Notebooks by Joanne Horniman

Back cover reads:
"My name is Kate O'Farrell and i am seventeen years old. i am in my last year of school, and when that is over, i will be leaving this place for good - going to a real city, where i will begin a new life. i have long red hair and pale skin. i like staying up very late at night. it is my ambition to see the sun rise, but sadly i am always asleep by then. i love eating and reading, preferably at the same time. i am very tall, and too thin. i have never been in love."

my gut reaction:
Holy crap. It's like the author cracked open my skull and dared to look inside. this book is giving serious competition to my all-time favorite book, Harriet the Spy. It's about scribbling... which is one of the things i do best. not only do i scribble... but i have several different notebooks with different purposes. I like it because there are 4 different kinds of scribbles, which implies 4 different levels of trust. The wild, typewritten pages seem to be things that Kate is willing to share with the public- her own story. Red notebook is for her thoughts and reactions to things... pretty personal. she uses the yellow notebook to write a fictional story. and the blue notebook has one little, insanely intimate blurb in it about her life. I love it. I love how much she trusts us. and I love the similarities between us. she and i say/do similar things like write to our journals instead of in them, we smell books, and we like oscar wilde. The plot is ok...I'm not really turning backflips over it. it's simple... just an interesting glimpse at a character. She lives in australia. I was kind of disappointed with the ending... but oh well. so yeah... i dog-eared about half the book for awesome quotes... so before i begin the monstrous list... allow me to say that, hands down, this wins a word nerd seal of approval. It also has some great words in it. I think it'd be appropriate for girls in grades 9 to ladies my age.... or really anyone who is a fan of filching a quiet moment to read or scribble. I don't know how much boys would like it though. i might have to run it by a few. but i love it.

Aight. on with the quotations:
"Sophie tells me that Oscar Wilde said to never trust a woman who reveals her age--she'll reveal anything" (2).

"You couldn't force a flower. When I was a child I used to pick camellia buds and strip the tightly wadded petals away, one by one, but I never ended up with an opened flower" (28).

"They were fiercely competitive. Someone would always be on the outer edges of the friendship. Sophie's love for them both (because it was a kind of love, I can see that now) went through extremes of emotion. They all knew the exact thing to say to cut the other to the heart" (30). This is why I didn't have many friendships with girls in high school. Too catty!!

"Mellifluous" (42).

"I flung myself from the room to answer it. I could feel myself doing the flinging, feeling ridiculous, but unable to stop myself" (42).

"Why does some celery insist on smelling like cat pee?" (44).

"gobsmacked" (44).

"They were a happiness of pears, sitting there in a row" (46).

"Pages are such daunting things. Unwritten on, they are so pure, so white, so unsullied, like freshly fallen snow. So silent" (55). scarlet to snow, anyone??

"Two crows fly from the room. As black as sin. The wind of their wings, cutting the air like a sword. Beaks sharp as spears. Cries like black ice" (65). Have you ever SEEN a crow in hot pursuit of prey? It's horrifying!

"She treated [reading] as a guilty pleausre that had to be stolen from the imperatives of the day. Sophie and I learned to snatch our reading time as well, and Lil was always onto us for reading when we ought to have been diong something else. Standing outside my room, she'd call, 'Kate, are you getting ready for school? .... Kate?..... KATE!' 'Yes, Lil?' 'I know what you're up to in there! Put down that book! Are you dressed yet?' 'Almost.' 'Well, hurry up about it, madam, or we'll have the police in here' " (68).

"People couldn't reach you when you were reading. It was a private experience, the ultimate intimacy, something between you and the book" (69).

"We spent our entire childhood reading. We nicked off from school to do it; we did it with torches in the small hours of the morning; we curled up hidden behind curtains; we climed trees for the express purpose of spending a few more stolen hours with a book, indirect defiance of the police, who never did manage to discover us. It was glorious" (69).

"'But breast-fed babies have such sweet, innocuous poo!' said Sophie" (75).

"A scholar has to read everything, regardless of whether they like it or not" (76).

"I opened it and breathed in the scent--it was a typical Old Book" (80).

"Because people must lie, even in their own diaries, musn't they?" (88). Woman in White, anyone??

"It was a veritable swimming pool of coffee, a lake of coffee" (103).

"parabola" (140).

"I was dispatched to the laundry to wash out the spot by hand. I bent my head to the task, a teenage Lady Macbeth ('Out, damned spot!'), aware of Alex out on the verandah with Sophie, without his shirt on" (140).

"The girl with the yellow hair goes again to the cafe, hoping to meet the boy she met there before. But he isn't there. Disappointment is like ashes in her throat" (144).

"Her I am already, scribbling again" (152).

"Such a meal would clog up my brain cells. Fish! I need Fish!" (152).

"I hate myself sometimes for my cruelty and tactlessness. Anyway, now what's done is done" (152).

"She put on her glasses. With Carmen's dress, they gave her the air of a librarian who was waiting for someone to ravish her" (154).

"It was too hot to be reading literature of any sort" (174).

"I remember how Sartre had written that it was quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. That it takes energy, generosity, blindness. He said that there was a moment, right at the start, where you had to jump across an abyss. If you thought about it, you didn't do it" (206). yeah pretty much.

"She has also read somewhere that when Virginia Woolf got married she decided to have books, not babies" (214).

"When she was a foetus she understood everything--Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce... but now that she has a baby she has forgotten it all, and has to start learning everything from scratch. Her current favourite is The Very Hungry Caterpillar" (215).