The Martlet

Fans of the hit TV series, beware: Carrie Bradshaw is back like you’ve never seen her before.

On April 27th, best-selling author Candace Bushnell released The Carrie Diaries, a prequel to her infamous collection of essays entitled Sex and the City.

This Carrie is a far cry from the savvy New Yorker we know and love, however. Instead she is a senior in a small-town Connecticut high school, and her eclectic group of friends spend their nights sneaking into the local Emerald bar and smoking in the attic of a barn.

To make matters even more interesting, it’s the 1980s — the music is synthesized; the spandex is neon.

Everything changes when Carrie falls for the good looks and bad-boy charm of Sebastian, the new kid in town. Of course, so does the entire female population of her graduating class, so it comes as a great surprise when Sebastian falls for her as well.

Just when we think The Carrie Diaries is about to follow in the footsteps of every teenage romance since Romeo and Juliet, the novel takes a dark shift. Sebastian turns out to be the worst first boyfriend in history, harassing her opinions and guilt-tripping her for not sleeping with him, and Carrie can only rationalize staying with him by suppressing the part of herself that feels like something’s wrong.

At the same time, she begins to indulge the writer part of herself that Sex and the City fans will recognize. With a little encouragement from friends and a second-wave feminist writer of her mother’s generation, Carrie develops her expressive side and, when she finally reaches her breaking point with Sebastian, she quickly learns that the best method of revenge is the pen.

By the novel’s end, we know how Carrie came to live in New York, how she met sex kitten Samantha Jones and, most importantly, how she developed from the meek and mild Carrie Bradshaw of The Carrie Diaries to the witty and fully self-expressed sex columnist of Sex and the City.

Fans of the TV series will be disappointed that Bushnell ignores everything mentioned about Carrie’s past in the episodes. For example, in the TV series, Carrie mentions that her father left her and her mother when she was young, but in the novel her father plays a strong role and her mother is dead.

Those who have read the original Sex and the City novel, however, will know how different it is from the TV series, which came second. The novel is a collection of newspaper articles from Bushnell’s sex column in The New York Observer, and the TV series is loosely based on this autobiographical account of her sex life.

Overall, The Carrie Diaries is an interesting and well-written portrayal of teenage life in the 1980s, with none of the sex and drug censorship and moral pooh-poohing that we so often find in teen fiction.

It’s the perfect pool-side read for the summer, and Bushnell will likely surprise her readers with a bit of wit and sarcasm that many writers in the genre fail to capture.