Edeet Ravel's The Thrilling Life of Pauline de Lammermoor and The Mysterious Adventures of Pauline Bovary (Raincoast, $11.95 each, ages 10 to 14) are a delightful addition to the girl diary genre. While most Princess Diary variants sport teens who are mundanely self-absorbed, Ravel gives us a heroine who has her share of self-interest but is an astute reader/ writer whose naivete is balanced by her attention to the advice in You too Can Write a Great Novel! In Pauline Bovary, the second book of this new series (a third is set for release this fall), Pauline has typical teen "problems" - her mom is dating an online Greek boyfriend, her dad's being courted by a really old woman of 56, and her best friend has moved away. Then there are her love problems, which peak at a "heroes" party Pauline attends as "John Milton on the weekends." Luckily, writing her own novel and reading Madame Bovary as she lives through all this turmoil gives Pauline new insight into the difference between imagination and delusions. With the Pauline stories, Edeet Ravel shows herself to be a dab hand at young adult lit too.

- Toronto Star

This is a funny one. It will leave you, as Pauline might say, ROFL. (Those of you who don’t keep up with trends the way I do might not know that that is a texting abbreviation for “rolling on the floor laughing.”) The first funny thing is a running adjective joke. Pauline, like many young writers, is drunk with her discovery of the thesaurus. Thus her mother speaks with a “grumpy, peevish and nihilistic” voice. Damp laundry left in the washing machine smells “stinking, putrid, vomity and ignoble.” Pauline has an off-centre take on the world. Her narrative is rich with delightful one-liners and not one of them is generic. “If I lived in a place called the Virgin Islands I would very simply kill myself.” She’s honest and self-aware. “I felt a bit less angry but I didn’t want to show it. It’s embarrassing if you feel less angry too fast, after you’ve really made a point of feeling mad.” The best vignettes are the weirdest. Pauline’s Grandma invents a birthday party game called “Mother, the Witch Stole Monday” that is so peculiar, it can only have come from real life. You just can’t make this stuff up. I’d pretty much go anywhere with Pauline. It is worth the whole book to find out why she kissed the not-boyfriend Yoshi in the storage room of the food bank where they were both volunteering. Pauline is funny and generous, crazy about words, clear-eyed (except when she’s totally off-base), loyal to her friends, and tolerant of her parents. These two books are cheeky, stylish, and, most of all, intelligent. In this trendspotter’s opinion, they are also very good VFM (value for money) .

- Sarah Ellis, Quill & Quire

As the summer begins, Pauline Corelli-Bloom, nearly 14, has decided what she is going to do with the rest of her life. After short-lived dreams of being an artist and a pianist have evaporated, she's decided a writer's life is for her. In fact, she's "going to be a world-famous, bestselling novelist." And in case we are concerned about the loftiness of her aspirations, she reassures us: "Don't worry, I'm not on my own here. I have expert advice at the tip of my fingers. As of this morning, I am the proud owner of You Too Can Write a Novel! By Zane Burbank III." The novel that emerges is this novel, a felicitous conceit by an author who has made her mark as an award-winning novelist in the adult field (Ten Thousand Lovers andA Wall of Light ). Pauline's novel, as the title might imply, is flamboyantly dramatic, involving a splintered best-friendship, moving back and forth between her separated parents' homes (and passing judgment on her mother's boyfriends), the general angst and ennui of early adolescence as experienced by our heroine and, of course, a school performance of Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor . Ravel's touch is light but spot on; the prospect of a series -- the next book, The Mysterious Adventures of Pauline Bovary , is in the works -- is good news for young adult readers.

- Globe & Mail