The further confessions are just as good as the original, if not better. Georgia gets dumped, and dumps others, and her life is in turmoil. Her father has moved to the other side of the world, for a job in New Zealand, but she doesn’t seem to care about that. Georgia gets by with her compassion and generosity.
 

I don’t want to be rude to the afflicted but Uncle Eddie is bald in a way which is the baldest I have ever seen. He looks like a boiled egg in leather trousers. Once he came round and after he and Mum had had their usual vat of wine he fell asleep in the back garden facedown. So I drew another face on the back of his head. In indellible pen.

It has to be said that Georgia’s family is unique: her Dad wants the family to visit him for the summer; her mother gets a crush on their GP, and drags her and her little sister off to the doctor at the smallest excuse; Uncle Eddie comes around on his pre-war motorcycle with side car and drinks large amounts of wine with Georgia’s mother. Georgia is simply trying to keep her sanity among all this madness while living with her personal romantic tragedy. She is an inspiration to the reader, because in true schoolgirl heroine style, she proves herself to be talented at tennis and field hockey, and what’s more, she stands up against the school bullies “The Bummer Twins.”

Everyone has a nickname in Georgia’s world: Wet Lindsay, Elvis, Herr Kamyer, Nauseating P. Green, Dave the Laugh, and Mrs. Big But Stupid Knickers. As in the previous book, Louise Rennison shows wonderful energy in her writing. She gives a highly credible portrayal of teenage life, even though it is very different from the stories of sex, drugs and guns on the one hand, or of the overworked children with every minute of their days devoted to school and extracurricular activities that we so often hear about. Georgia is hardly innocent, but her concerns seem very appropriate for her age, and her ways of coping with problems seem pretty healthy–especially her interest in reducing her feelings of stress through yoga.

Georgia is not a likely candidate for college, but that’s not so unusual in Britain. Her life is in many ways immersed in British culture, even though she puts very few specific details of TV shows and pop stars in her diary, and her attitudes reveal differences between the US and Britain. One aspect of life that seems strangely absent in her world is multiculturalism. The fabric of British life is increasingly affected by its immigrant population of Indians, Pakistanis, Jamaicans, and young people moving from the rest of Europe, but there’s little reflection of that in On the Bright Side…

Although Georgia’s life is sheltered within white middle class culture, there’s room for growth. Rennison plans at least two more books in this series, and hopefully Georgia’s horizons will widen as she gets older. Georgia’s greatest strength is her humor and I’m eager to find out how she uses it to cope with her future trials and tribulations.

Published in Britain as It’s“O.K., I’m Wearing Really Big Knickers! Further Confessions of Georgia Nicholson.“