ttyl
2005 · book
Audacious author Lauren Myracle accomplishes something of a literary miracle in her second young-adult novel, ttyl(Internet instant messaging shorthand for "talk to you later"), as she crafts an epistolary novel entirely out of IM transcripts between three high-school girls.Far from being precious, the format proves perfect for accurately capturing the sweet histrionics and intimate intricacies of teenage girls. Grownups (and even teenage boys) might feel as if they've intercepted a raw feed from Girl Secret Headquarters, as the book's three protagonists--identified by their screen names "SnowAngel," "zoegirl," and "mad maddie"--tough their way through a rough-and-tumble time in high school. Conversations range from the predictable (clothes, the delicate high-school popularity ecosystem, boys, boys in French class, boys in Old Navy commercials, etc.) to the the jarringly explicit (the girls discuss female ejaculation: "some girls really do, tho. i read it in our bodies, ourselves") and the unintentionally hilarious (Maddie's IM reduction of the Christian poem "Footprints"--"oh, no, my son. no, no, no. i was carrying u, don't u c?"). But Myracle's triumph in ttyl comes in leveraging the language-stretching idiom of e-mail, text messaging, and IM. Reaching to express themselves, the girls communicate almost as much through punctuation and syntactical quirks as with words: "SnowAngel: 'cuz--drumroll, please--ROB TYLER is in my french class!!! *breathes deeply, with hand to throb