Girl Stories

Weinstein's short, bitterly hilarious stories of teenage-girl angst were a popular feature on gURL.com; this book collects them, along with new material that turns them into a loose narrative of her semiautobiographical protagonist's eighth- and ninth-grade years. "Lauren" is obsessively concerned with her social standing and weight, guilty about still playing with Barbies, fixated on Morrissey, annoyed by being Jewish at Christmas, tormented by a navel piercing gone awry and perplexed by the mystery of boys and why they like her or don't. (It doesn't help that everyone in her school is as cruel as, well, teenagers.) Fortunately, her imagination, her sense of humor and her knack for woe-is-me exaggeration are her escape routes. Weinstein draws her stories with frantic, scraggly lines and eye-scalding neon colors straight off the teenage cosmetics rack. Everything looks crude and distorted on the surface, but her artwork is a lot cleverer and subtler than it initially appears. Weinstein understands the painful immediacy of everything in teenagers' lives—how every success, even in egging a tree, feels like a monumental victory, and every moment of social or academic awkwardness feels like the end of the world—and these anecdotes and images both sympathize with and mock this revelation. (Apr.)