Byline: by Lorne Jackson
Hop Scotch & Handbags - The Essential Guide to Being A Girl (Headline Review, pounds 12.99)
ALTHOUGH I'm a bloke, I feel singularly qualified to discuss a guide book about the pros and cons of being a girl.
After all, I happen to have a first name that swings both ways.
Over the years, this has meant that I have often been invited into the fraternity of frisky females.
When I first applied to university, I was sent a bulk load of bumf explaining how, as a young gal, many opportunities were open to me.
flexible lightThanks to my pesky name, I've also been sent oodles of feminist literature and women's underwear catalogues.
(OK, I ordered the underwear catalogues myself - suspenders are softer on a bloke's legs than a pair of rough old socks.) The latest slab of girlie guff to arrive in my post is Hop Scotch & Handbags, a chunky guidebook explaining how to be a proper young lady.
I'm sure author Lucy Mangan doesn't expect her readers to take the volume too seriously. It's more of a tongue in cheek look at the behaviour of young women.
In the section titled 'Five good reasons to get married' she includes the desire to wear a fancy white frock while receiving loads of presents.
In the part explaining how you know that you are a girl and not a boy, she writes: "You do all the talking and you can make a towel turban for wet hair."
As you may have guessed from the above, Mangan has not produced a sparkling work of satire. Her observations are about as sharp as a rusty pair of garden shears.
They either come under the heading of (a) bleedin' obvious, (b) facts that are not just true of women, but of men as well, or (c) not true of men, women, vegetables or minerals.
She claims that women tend to talk more than their boyfriends.
A sweeping generalisation, true. But correct, nonetheless. In fact, so darned correct that it also happens to be a big, fat cliche, and can't be described as fresh knowledge.
The same goes for the devastating insight that women like to buy shoes.
I may not be a bona fide bint, but I do know a cobbled-together crock when I see one.
This isn't an essential guide about how to be a girl. It's a textbook method for a street-smart writer to make a quick and uninspiring buck.
cheap abercrombieWhile Hop Scotch & Handbags might be limp and lacklustre lit for ladies, there's something much more stirring for the lads.
Penguin has released revamped editions of some classic boys' adventure stories, all written during the golden period from the 1880s until the 1920s when daring deeds were demanded to defeat dastardly fiends.
New editions include John Buchan's The 39 Steps, better than any Bond of the James variety.
There's also the slightly less well-known The Riddle Of The Sands by Erskine Childers - a patriotic potboiler which, curiously, was written by a man shot by the British government as a traitor.
(Childers was a British MP, who later took up the Irish cause, a decision which spelled his doom.) The author's personal history was tragic, but Childers' only novel is a classic, and fondly remembered by adventure-lovers as the first au
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