Bel Reviews: Maya Van Waganenen's - "Popular: Vintage Wisdom for a Modern Geek (A Memoir)"

You all remember that scene from Mean Girls, where Janis is explaining the cliques in the school cafeteria?

Maya starts out below the bottom rung on the popularity ladder at the beginning of eighth grade.

In short, she rediscovers a book written in 1951 by a woman called Betty Cornell, and embarks on a year of experimenting with ideas from the book to see if the Teenage Popularity Guide could do the seemingly impossible–make Maya popular.

The chapters are broken into months and each one tackles a different ‘issue.’  So from top to tail ‘things’ are addressed, and Maya steadfastly battles to not cave in. She has small wins along the way, and to begin with, people react the way you would expect.

There are so many moments of snort-giggle inducing hilarity, that when Maya gets serious, it carries an impressive amount of weight. There are definitely more things going on here than learning how to wash your hair and how to have better posture.

I originally got this book hoping my daughter would read it, because she’s having difficulty connecting with the cliques at her school. Her initial thoughts were that Maya ‘changed herself for the expressed purpose of being popular’, which meant she wasn’t being her authentic self.  I’m still holding out hope she’ll change her mind and give it a chance. Maya is still Maya, but she’s just less fearful of what other people think of her.

There are some things in the book the average Aussie teen won’t be able to put into place at school like the dress code and the string of pearls. The majority of the other ideas will produce surprising results.

I believe Popular was more about blurring the lines chasms between the separate groups in a school, than it ever was about a person becoming more pleasing to the eye.

Maya is a really well spoken young woman, and I do hope she’ll continue writing, as she has a brilliant sense of humour and a fearless outlook on life.

The most important question that started it all was what does popular mean?

You’ll be astounded to read what Maya and her peers come to realise is the truth of Popularity.

I’d love to know what you consider to be the definition of Popular.

https://twitter.com/MayaVanWagenen

Paperback, 259 pages

Published April 15th 2014 by Penguin

ISBN 0141353252 (ISBN13: 9780141353258)