Planet Janet is the fictional diary of Janet Bandry,
a teen girl in Britain. Very much in
the tradition of Angus, Thongs,
and Full-Frontal Snogging, it tells of a slightly later phase of
adolescence. Janet’s friends have got
to the stage of actually having sex, although Janet’s unsettled romantic life
is still in its early stages. For one
thing, there’s too much going on in her family, since her parents are having
lots of problems. It’s hard to know exactly
what is going on between them, because Janet’s descriptions of her family are
rather slanted. Her psychotherapist
father is “Sigmund,” and her mother is the “Mad Cow” or just “MC.” Her elder brother has a girl stalking him,
and her grandmother comes to live with the family, much to Sigmund’s
displeasure. Janet chronicles the
madness and misunderstandings of her house with great energy, and the diary is
extremely entertaining. The
“Britishisms” have not been translated into American English, which is a good
thing, since the greatest charm of the book comes from the inventive use of
language. There is a glossary at the
end of the book to help bemused readers who are unfamiliar with terms such as
“blokes,” “chuffed,” “ginormous,” “gobsmacked,” “loo,” “knickers,” “lorryload,”
and, of course, “snogging.”

© 2003 Christian Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is
Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island, and editor
of Metapsychology Online Review. His main research is on philosophical
issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Children, Relationships