By Bianca Garcia
A Sex and the City Prequel for Teens of All Ages
She’s wearing a vintage dress and dating an older man. She smokes, she writes, she lusts after Fiorucci boots. It’s Carrie Bradshaw, and she’s in high school.
Summer and the City is the sequel to The Carrie Diaries, in which chick-lit royalty Candace Bushnell explores young Carrie’s early experiences in New York. In Summer, Carrie is a naïve suburban teen who arrives in the city for a summer writing class and begins her metropolitan adventures. Here, Carrie starts to develop as a writer, to infiltrate the social scene, and to develop her neuroses about love, life, and men. And she already has the voice that all Sex and the City fans know and love—or hate (Carrie is a polarizing figure after all). It’s Carrie-speak, through and through:
Or maybe he’s falling in love with the idea of falling in love with me. Maybe he wants to be in love with someone and I’ve ended up in the right place at the right time. And suddenly, I’m nervous.
Perhaps I’ve watched too many SATC episodes on TV (not to mention both movies, multiple times), but reading this young adult book feels exactly like watching a lighter but longer episode of the popular series.
I can clearly imagine Sarah Jessica Parker’s girlish squeals and hoarse voice as Carrie Bradshaw, making her observations about other people and asking her pondering questions. I see Cynthia Nixon’s red hair and feminist zeal as the young Miranda Hobbes, full of eagerness and cynicism at the same time. And I picture Kim Cattrall as Samantha Jones, with her successful career (Samantha is already a glamorous 25-year-old who works at an advertising agency), throaty laugh, and obsession with getting married.
You read that right: Samantha Jones, obsessed with marriage. Apparently, she was Charlotte York even before Charlotte, who is introduced only at the very end. Like Charlotte in the TV series, the Samantha in Summer has a timeline for her life that involves marrying her rich boyfriend and having kids within the next few years.
The book is not just about Carrie, it’s about the gals of SATC before they became the fashionable, established, self-assured group of women we’ve read about and watched for years. While the YA format may seem a strange expansion of the SATC franchise—the most loyal fans being my age (30) and older—it works well for providing a previously missing piece of the story: its origin. This book delivers a plausible backstory for these favorite characters, and it does so with humor and gravity, right from its opening lines:
First Samantha asks me to find her shoe. When I locate it in the sink, she asks me to a party.
So, yes, this summer I’m recommending reading a very pink, very girly-looking book for young adults. Of course, as I immerse myself in it, I’m reminded of the book’s primary market: teen-agers who can relate to the high-school version of Carrie. The plot line is predictable and a little too simplistic. The language is young Carrie’s train of thought, filled with short sentences and dramatic generalizations:
Maybe Wendy had a point about New York, after all. No matter what you think you can be, when you’re forced to stop and look at where you actually are, it’s pretty depressing.
The characters are always hanging out with each other. (Don’t they have other friends? Family?) And everyone has a crush on someone. It’s exactly what teen novels are made of.
The book even has a QR code on the back, which tech-savvy readers can scan to access a special Carrie Diaries site for mobile devices—a site that proclaims you can “meet Carrie Bradshaw before Sex and the City.” It features information about the books and characters, including Insider Tips and Tricks (such as “Samantha Jones’s Top Ten Tips for City Girls”) and yearbook quotes and nicknames for Carrie and her classmates.
But then again, aren’t we all teenagers, in a way? Don’t we all need tips and tricks and friends we can always rely on? And don’t we all always have a crush on someone.
Because here’s the thing about reading and watching and growing up with Carrie-speak: It’s contagious.
Publishing Information
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Summer and the City: A Carrie Diaries Novel by Candace Bushnell (Balzer + Bray, 2011).
Bianca Garcia is the social media consultant for Talking Writing and a food writer for Confessions of a Chocoholic.
She is spending the summer in her city (Boston), where she’ll be running races, eating ice cream, planning dinners, and, on really hot days, staying home to watch reruns of Sex and the City.
