Why did I read this book?  I could take the Savannah Knoop route and blame everyone but myself. I could say that it was recommended to me by the representative of the small press that printed this book (true), I could say that I was interested to get an inside look at this scam on readers, one in a seemingly-endless series of scams (true), I could say I was looking for gems of wisdom (false).   I will now take the blame and say I was looking for proof that people really were idiotic to be taken in by this portrayal of a boy by a girl, backed up by the every-present puppeteer sister-in-law .Guess what?  The proof is there, on every page.  But who really needs proof that human beings can act like idiots?  Better  proof can be found elsewhere, in any event.  In books that are better-written (and can we be sure Knoop wrote this one?), less self-promoting and more reflective, and far more interesting.  And there are much better celebrity tell-all books out there too.  You can’t go wrong with an Andrew Morton expose and I’ve heard the Helen Mirren tell-all, In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures is pretty good.

What did I learn from this book?  Not much.  I did learn that Savannah Knoop uses words she does not know the meaning of and that her editors at Seven Stories didn’t catch the mistakes that they should have caught when checking this manuscript.  For example, “gloaming” means twilight and never, ever can be used to describe a dawn.  It is an insult — and should be a legally actionable insult — to the poet W.B Yeats who uses the word tenderly and to the beautiful short story, Into the Gloaming, by Alice Elliot Dark, to misuse that word.  “Malapert” meaning  bold and saucy doesn’t work when describing hair hanging over a forehead and “inchoate” means slowly appearing, starting to appear, and so a grin cannot both creep onto a face and be inchoate: that is like saying a soon-to-be published book is soon to be published.

That said, I found the book fast-moving and it flowed easily.  But I wish Knoop could have used the book as a vehicle to write about something real, like how does an eighteen year old girl fall into a situation she cannot handle and how does she change from that situation, what words of advice does she have for insecure and lost eighteen year-olds?  There are many young women out there with body-image issues, scared of the future and yet eager to become adults.  That is Savannah’s story but she never tells it.  She sticks to celebrity-name dropping, insipid commentary on her sex life, and the too-comfortable role of victim.  And no, I am not looking forward to the clothes line she promotes in the book.  I’d rather stick to my inchoate dreams of malapert outfits fit for the gloaming.