Rowena’s review of Brooklyn Girls by Gemma Burgess.

Fantastically funny, fresh and utterly relatable, Brooklyn Girls by Gemma Burgess is the first novel in her brand new series about five twenty-something friends—Pia, Angie, Julia, Coco and Madeleine—sharing a brownstone in hip, downtown Brooklyn, and discovering the ups and downs and ins and outs of their “semi-adult” lives. The first story belongs to sophisticated, spoiled, and stylish Pia, who finds herself completely unemployed, unemployable, and broke. So what is a recent grad with an art history degree and an unfortunate history of Facebook topless photos to do? Start a food truck business of course! Pia takes on the surprisingly cutthroat Brooklyn world of hybrid lettuce growers, artisanal yogurt makers and homemade butter producers to start SkinnyWheels—all while dealing with hipster bees, one-night-stands, heartbreak, parental fury, wild parties, revenge, jail, loan sharks, playboys, karaoke, true love, and one adorable pink food truck. And that’s without counting her roommates’ problems, too. Gemma Burgess has captured the confusion, hilarity and excitement of the post-graduate years against a backdrop of the pressures and chaos of New York City life, with heartfelt empathy, fast humor and sharp honesty.

A charming debut series about five twenty-something girls and the humor, heartbreak, and drama that bring them together.

When I read the blurb for this book, I thought it was going to be a light and fluffy read. Something that will make laugh and it sounded like something I’m always in the mood for that’s not what I got with this book. I mean, sure it was funny and the characters got themselves into some pretty wild situations but there was a deeper feel to the book that I thought was interesting.

This book is what I assume will be a series, following each girl that was introduced in this book. A bunch of young housemates living in Brooklyn and living their lives…one mistake at a time. This book follows Pia. She’s the party girl, the girl that’s always down for a good time but doesn’t do commitments. She’s more of the friends with benefits type of girl and she’d like to keep it that way.

This book starts off with Pia waking up with one of her housemates brothers. The housemate that hates her guts. Not wanting to start drama so early in the morning, Pia tries to think of ways to get him out of the house without anyone seeing. Once she’s out of her room, real life starts intruding and the aftermath of her bad decisions from the night before hits her right smack in the face. She’s kind of the wild child of the house and things just aren’t going well for her. She loses her job, her parents call to yell at her and tell her to get her shit together or she’s moving back home with them and she’s got to deal with the irate neighbor that is completely disgusted with her so early in the morning.

In a nutshell, Pia is screwed.

Over the course of the book, you see the change slowly come over Pia and at first, she was such a dumbass that I wanted to smack her up and down the street. Over and over again. But she wasn’t a totally unlikable character. She was just imperfect. She had a lot to learn and I thought Burgess did a great job of telling Pia’s story. She stayed true to Pia’s age and Pia made a lot of mistakes that someone her age would do. They lived the lives that I was living when I was 22 (or as much as I could being a single mother and all) minus all of the drug use.

There were times when I got annoyed with the characters in this book but overall, I thought this was a solid read. It was interesting to read Pia’s story and I came to like and respect her in the end.

Grade: 3 out of 5

This book is available from St. Martin’s Griffin. You can purchase it here or here in e-format. This book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.