by Louise Rennison HarperTempest, 2003 Review by Christian Perring, Ph.D. on Apr 7th 2003
Dancing in My Nuddy-Pants is the fourth in the
Georgia Nicolson series, and it sticks to the tried-and-tested formula.Georgia is a teen girl living in England and
these books are her diaries about her family, friends and boyfriends.Maybe even more than in the previous
installments, the most striking feature of Georgia’s writing is her funny way
with words.Describing a brief
encounter with her boyfriend Robbie, who she calls “the Sex God,” she writes,
“Quick visit to number four on the snogging scale (kiss lasting three minutes
without a breath).Yummy scrumboes and
marveloso.”However, Georgia faces a
personal dilemma, because she is still attracted to her old boyfriend, Dave the
Laugh, who is now seeing one of her friends, Emma.The last book ended with her being in a room alone with Dave at a
party, when she lost her self-control, and they accidentally snogged.As she says, it was “a brilliant display of
red-bottomosity.”To put Georgia’s
point more prosaically, she was shocked by her ability to act so
shamelessly.She wants to do the right
thing, but she often finds that she can’t really talk with Robbie about her
worries or achievements, while she was able to joke and talk with Dave the
Laugh about anything.So amid the
craziness of her life – going to practice sessions of Robbie’s band The Stiff
Dylans, being forced to help with the school pantomime, Peter Pan, a school
trip to Paris, lots of time chatting and disco-dancing with her friends,
looking after her little sister Libby – Georgia is also learning about
relationships and how to decide on a boyfriend.Dancing in My Nuddy-Pants is not quite as fabuloso as the earlier
books in the series, but it still excellent stuff.American readers will be grateful for a glossary at the back
explaining some of the unfamiliar words, although I suspect that many will
still be pretty mystified by much of Georgia’s vocabularly.
Christian Perring, Ph.D., is
Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island, and editor
of Metapsychology Online Review. His main research is on philosophical
issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.
