Recent Arrivals chronicles the books that have made their way onto the Today, I Read… bookshelf. Here’s the latest arrival: Undiscovered Gyrl by Allison Burnett

First line: Last April when I decided to defer college for a year my friends said I was insane, but I’m not.

Initial thoughts: I can’t say entirely why this title appealed to me as much as it did. Maybe it’s the voyeur in me wanting to break free. There’s something interesting about watching sometime’s life unfold as though you were peeping in through a window–see how other people live…even if it is a work of fiction. Plus, it ups the ante by revealing these escapades via blog entries. Also, I wanted to see how a middle-aged man would handle writing a teenage female protagonist.

Book description:

From the back cover

Only on the internet can you have so many friends and be so lonely.

• We’re all famous in our own minds.
• Complete honesty is a complete lie.
• All sex has consequences, most of them dire.
• Don’t read my life. Go live your own!

From Amazon.com

Beautiful, wild, funny, and lost, Katie Kampenfelt is taking a year off before college to find her passion. Ambitious in her own way, Katie intends to do more than just smoke weed with her boyfriend, Rory, and work at the bookstore. She plans to seduce Dan, a thirty-two-year-old film professor.

Katie chronicles her adventures in an anonymous blog, telling strangers her innermost desires, shames, and thrills. But when Dan stops taking her calls, when her alcoholic father suffers a terrible fall, and when she finds herself drawn into a dangerous new relationship, Katie’s fearless narrative begins to crack, and dark pieces of her past emerge.

Sexually frank, often heartbreaking, and bursting with devilish humor, Undiscovered Gyrl is an extraordinarily accomplished novel of identity, voyeurism, and deceit.

Book Details: 304 pages; Vintage; Pub. August 11, 2009

Learn more:

• Read Undiscovered Gyrl’s blog
• Official website
• Reviews:
  • Bella’s Novella
  • In Search of Giants (very thorough)
  • chaotic compendiums

There’s even a book trailer which I thought was pretty good (and that’s coming from someone who’s not a big fan of book trailers).