Simmone Howell is an award-winning short story writer, screenwriter and small press publisher. Her short film Pity24 was awarded the 2004 AWGIE and has screened at highly regarded film festivals such as the London Australian Film Festival and Los Angeles Shorts Fest. Simmone is in the final year of her literature degree at Deakin University, has various writing projects on the go and is in talks to develop Notes from the Teenage Underground into a feature film.
Heathers meets I Shot Andy Warhol in this gritty ode to underground cool by award-winning screenwriter and debut Australian novelist Howell. The story's contagious blend of video store lingo, catty alpha girl politics and a twinge of real heart is both knowingly pretentious and fun. When 17-year-old Gem and her anti-establishment pals, Lo and Mira, form a group called Ug (short for Underground) in order to flaunt and elevate their fringe social standing, there's no doubt that each of their lives is about to change. "To be really Ug means you don't give a fig about the status quo. You can be ugly, or a virgin, or a lesbian, but whatever you are you revel in it." Ug's goal? To shock their cookie-cutter classmates by making a subversive film and airing it at a "Happening," a la Warhol's Factory. When the supposedly united trio's plan backfires (as Mira messes around with Gem's dodgy crush and Lo turns haughty and controlling), Gem decides to create and air a solo project about life as she sees it. Despite the friends' harried break-up, Gem realizes, "It's better to think that we're all different but we're also all people and people have to live together." With references to Valerie Solanas, Edie Sedgwick, Dostoevsky and Germaine Greer, teen misfits and film geeks will devour this renegade read with pleasure. Ages 14-up. (Apr.) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
Gr 9 Up-Seventeen-year-old Gem feels as if she's beginning to drift away from her best friends, Lo and Mira, with whom she's formed an alliance against the "sucker peers" they call "barcodes." In the spirit of Andy Warhol and his Happenings, Gem comes up with the idea to make an edgy film to screen at an underground party, she thinks this project will bring the three girls back together again. As scriptwriting and production begins, however, she starts to feel that the project is getting out of control. When Lo and Mira plan a series of final-exam pranks without her, Lo rewrites Gem's admittedly heavy-handed but heartfelt script, and Mira hooks up with her crush, Gem knows it's time to break ties with her so-called best friends. Deceptively little happens in this Australian novel. Gem's predicament is realistic and somewhat sympathetically related; however, a secondary plot involving her estranged father threatens to take over the primary narrative of the friendships' dissolution. Though Gem narrates the story, it is surprisingly difficult to get to know her, perhaps because the antics and personalities of her friends are so overwhelming. At the end of the novel, when she is finding her way solo and when at last she seems to have found an ally, her character finally emerges.-Amy S. Pattee, Simmons College, Boston Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
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