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Dancing in My Nuddy-Pants coverLove, Laughter, and the Cosmic Horn

Author: Louise Rennison

The whirlwind life of self-absorbed and hilarious teen Georgia Nicholson is back with an angsty love-triangle, a trip to Paris, and some surprise kittens. Still the girlfriend of Robbie, the much older Sex-God, all is not well in the land of love and snogging scales. With the Stiff Dylan’s new album taking off, Robbie is traveling more than ever and Georgia and her red bottom are left behind with increasingly boyfriend happy friends (all of whom have their own snogging antics to tell). When Dave-the-Laugh, now boyfriend of Ellen, enters the picture again, Georgia is torn between loyalty to romance and the free-wheeling lifestyle of a snogging addicted teen. Whatever will she do?

As with the previous books, it’s all absurdity, hijinks, jokes, and a nostalgia that brings back the confusion of early teen years without (thankfully) really taking us back to those high days of drama. We can laugh and sympathize easily, but it’s all “away laughing on a fast camel” after all, and it will probably turn out all right. If it doesn’t . . .  well, Georgie will have something snarky to say about it!

What surprised me here, or more appropriately let me down, about Dancing in My Nuddy-Pants, is the sameness. It reminds me of that third Austin Power’s movie (no, I don’t remember the name and be honest, you don’t either) where all the same jokes and situations are spliced together. There’s not much that’s new and what is just isn’t that interesting. As a matter of fact, readers begin to get a little bored and ratty at Georgia’s typical shallowness and tendency to add “ocity” to the end of every frickin’ word… What we loved (or in the case of the overdone words, tolerated) before is put on repeat and not much difference can be seen from Knocked Out By My Nunga-Nungas, which was pretty hilarious and addicting throughout, and the storyline here.

Georgia as a character doesn’t grow here and while that’s not surprising, or even necessarily what we want as readers, the entire do-I-want-the-Sex-God or do-I-want-Dave-the-Laugh scenario takes Georgia to a whole new level of flippant shallowness. Add in the fact that a close(ish) friend is dating Dave, and you have a recipe to not like Georgia so much and wonder if the author is promoting a certain level of absorption that goes beyond funny and nostalgic to harmful. You can’t have it all and more than likely Georgia will find this out in the next book . . .  but there is no resolution here, no lesson, and not much of a decision. We’re still where Nunga-Nungas ended after all. And let’s face it, we saw Georgia’s “I’ll have my cake and eat it too” decision as inevitable before the first chapter of Nuddy-Pants even concluded.

There are still some funny exploits here and, of course, plenty of Angus action as the vicious kitty and Mr. and Mrs. Next Door become embroiled over a surprise kitten scandal. Still, it’s just not enough and even fans of the series will be ready to hit the fast-forward and go onward to the next book. Dancing in my Nuddy-Pants is a pause, filler, in an otherwise delightful escapade and while not bad, even fans will be happy to forget it and jump into the next Georgia book, where hopefully events will pick-up and new levels of ridiculousness will abound.

Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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