So I’m in Value Village. I don’t know if you Americans have Value Village down there, but if you don’t know what it is, it’s a thrift shop chain of stores. There’s like, four in every town. It’s basically like the Tim Hortons of thrift shops. (I guess you wouldn’t know what Tim Hortons is, either.)Sometimes I like to kill time reading the books that crop up in the book section of Value Village. I’ll kill time waiting for a family member to finish looking at drapes and bathcoats by sitting down on one of the for-sale couches and immersing myself in a true crime novel or something.Today, what do I see in the “Teen” section but a whole bunch of Melody Carlson novels. (I use the term loosely.) Back when I went to Sunday School regularly (the “We’re-Adults-But-We’re-Cool-And-Swaggy” teen version of Sunday School, anyway), I used to go to the library when I had some free time before church and pick up a novel or two. Once, I read Pat Robertson’s The End of the Age. Craziest ride I’ve ever had reading a book, I’ll tell you. Anyway, the library had a whole stash of “They’re Just Like You!” type of teen-Christian-girl diary books, all written by Melody Carlson. I read the whole shebang and liked them well enough, back when I was 12 or so, and forgot about them.A couple months ago, I re-read one of the “Kim” series of diaries, and thought it was sweet, heartfelt, and not one of the shoving-aggressive-Christianity-down-your-throat types I unfortunately have been exposed to. So today, when I saw a whole bunch of Melody Carlson books in Value Village, I decided to read one again, to see what I had been exposed to many years before.The first one I perused was in her “TrueColors” series of novels or whatever. It was called “Moon White”, and was about a girl being exposed to Wicca. I found it fluffy, light, and very stereotypical of what a Wiccan person might be like (they’re all evil in some way, whether it be the “Lying Cheating Stepmother” brand of evil or the “I’m going to sell you a thirty-dollar book that’s worth nothing” type evil). I skimmed it and finished it in a minute.Next, I decided to try “On My Own”. It’s the fourth in the series of novels that are the diaries of intensely-Christian girl Caitlin. I don’t remember reading these when I was a kid – I fixated on the Kim ones because I related to her – but I decided to try it anyway.Wow.First of all, the font is insufferable. It’s spiky and hard to read. I guess it’s supposed to provide a sense of realism – “It’s a real girl’s handwriting!” – but it just didn’t work.Secondly, and this is the biggie: Caitlin is the kind of person I absolutely detest. She is a caricature of a Christian college girl. She’s intensely naïve, high-and-mighty in the worst way, and just basically an awful person, as well as a bland and uninteresting one. Her voice is insufferable. I mean it. The very first page has this little tidbit as Caitlin talks about moving out of her home in preparation for college: “Today’s my official “Independence Day”, and let me tell you, it feels totally great! All right, Caitlin, let’s settle down, girl.” She talks to her diary this way. Do you get what I’m dealing with here?A few pages later, she talks about “falling into temptation” with a male friend, and goes on to say: “I mean, it is possible for guys and girls to be just friends, but you have to keep a pretty close eye on things to succeed at it.” Caitlin seems to believe that a female cannot have a male friend, or vice versa, without wanting to do the dirty with him within a few minutes of meeting. Nice. I imagine she’s somehow related to the Duggars and will have to be supervised during her “courtship rituals” when she finds a nice man. Things really start getting bad (for the reader’s brain cells, that is) when Caitlin meets her college roommate, Elizabeth. Elizabeth is blunt and practical, which makes Caitlin quite uncomfortable. She tells Caitlin that they don’t have to be friends, because Elizabeth (Liz) picks her friends carefully. When Caitlin starts to baby Liz (asking her if she has yet to register, in a manner that suggests she wants to treat Liz like a five-year-old, like she frequently mentally accuses Liz of doing to her), Liz immediately sets the record straight, letting Caitlin know she doesn’t want to be babied. When Caitlin tells her where she’s going, Liz tells her, “You don’t have to tell me where you’re going. Don’t you get it? We don’t have to check in with each other. Let’s be adults here.”Let’s get this straight: I love Liz. Mostly because I hate Caitlin at this point and want to see her get treated the way she ought to be treated, but also because I think if Caitlin were any kind of an interesting and decent (read: non high-and-mighty) person, she and Liz would have ended up getting along peachy. Unfortunately, Caitlin isn’t the kind of person who can hold her own against Liz, so she immediately flees the room and internally shrieks, and I quote: “What a complete jerk! What a total idiot! Liz Banks is an absolute moron! How can I possibly room with someone like that?” And THEN the kicker: “Then I even started to wonder if Liz might simply have a really devastating case of PMS!”If I may be so bold, and blunt, and to the point: Caitlin is an irritating dumbass.But then: “…I began to actually pray about this whole situation… I asked God why He’d put me in a room with someone like Liz Banks. Then I asked Him if I should seek to change rooms. Finally, I decided to earnestly pray for Liz… I’ve known some difficult people in the last couple years, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever met anyone who came across quite as cold and hard as Liz.” First: Caitlin is quite an overreacter. Liz didn’t say anything that was so inflammatory it should lead people to want to PRAY for her, for crying out loud, let alone anything that wasn’t true! Second: If Caitlin thinks Liz is “cold and hard”, and in fact is so cold and hard that Caitlin’s never come across anyone worse, I wonder if Caitlin has ever left the comfort and safety of her home before. I seriously do.Later, Caitlin gets pissy about Liz’s choice of music, saying it’s too bleak and depressing for her, in fact so bleak and depressing that she had to leave the room. And after that, she returns to the room and: “Then I may put on a good CD of my own – quietly of course. I don’t want to irritate my roomie. Not too much, anyway.”Ho, ho! Now the true colors are coming out. Blah, blah, blah, boring stuff happens. Finally, Caitlin gets a letter from her boy toy Josh’s sister Chloe (who I seem to recall eventually became some kind of rock star or something in her own series of books). Caitlin asks for advice in dealing with Liz, but adds this little tidbit: “It made me feel a little silly though, as if I’m going to a fifteen-year-old (who’s not even a believer yet) for advice.”Come on, Caitlin. You can’t be more than eighteen yourself, and from the way you talk, you read like a nine-year-old. Additionally, this just in: non-Christians cannot possibly have good advice for dealing with pesky roommates. A few pages later, a surprise: when comparing Liz to her “flaky” friend Rachel, Caitlin actually refers to Liz as “intellectual and opinionated”. Wow! Where did THAT come from?Chapter four begins with: “Grrrr! I am so totally furious that I can barely write!... Easy does it, girl. Remember God is in control, right?”Is this diary even real?So, it turns out Caitlin was asked to leave their shared room by Liz, who needed to patch things up with her boyfriend Jordan. When Caitlin returns, she’s forgotten her key and asks Liz to let her in. She hears giggling but no response, which automatically leads her to sex: “The thought of them—well, getting physically intimate—in MY room is just way over the top! I mean, I don’t actually know if that’s what’s going on, but on the other hand, I wasn’t born yesterday!”I’m actually not kidding. I transcribed these words directly from this non-parody book. Melody Carlson seriously wrote this character and thought she was kind, relatable, funny and totally bearable. This book honestly reads like it was written by the Harvard Lampoon. Additionally: YOUR room? I seem to recall it’s your SHARED room that you share with your ROOMMATE. What a jerk, as well as a prude. Jeez.A few days later, Caitlin goes: “I have a feeling that I’m depressed.” She describes a thick, black cloud hanging over her, and being homesick. This newfound “depression” lasts for two days, at which point Caitlin goes to church and then is fine and barely mentions it again. Yeah, right. You were totally clinically depressed. That was so totally a thing. For, like, thirty seconds. You go, girl. Soon, Caitlin is getting kind of chummy with Liz, and somehow Liz has a relatively heartfelt talk with Caitlin as they talk about their preconceived notions of each other. Wow. I expected more, Liz. Blah, blah, blah. Somebody has a baby. Caitlin goes to church. Then, Liz and Rachel get into a fight at a party which is about the only thing that happens up until November 8, at which point Caitlin’s raging fury is unleashed like a volcano (the date headline is subtitled “ARRRRGHH!!!!!!”). “Disaster, disaster, disaster! No, my roommate hasn’t shot herself, but let me tell you it’s a good thing I didn’t have a gun in my hands this evening because I just might have shot her myself! Okay, not really! Good grief, I would never do that. Still, I was seriously mad! Furious even! Actually, I’m still pretty angry.”Wow. I couldn’t tell. Anyway, it transpires that what happened was: Liz read Caitlin’s diary and gets rightfully pissed off that Caitlin wrote such terrible things about her (because honestly some of the things Caitlin’s said about Liz are A) very personal and B) very offensive). Somehow Caitlin goes right past the idea of apologizing for writing bad things about Liz, and goes straight to being furious about Liz reading the diary: “Even my own little brother had never dared to step over this line!” Wow. Oh, dear. Her fury has been unleashed upon the earth. Heaven help us.When Liz starts talking angrily – and rightfully so – “her tone of voice was acidic, poisonous, lethal even.” A few sentences later: “She… looks up at me with what seems like totally unveiled hatred. In that moment, I feel almost as if I’m looking into the devil’s eyes.” Hot damn. Liz, tear her a new one. I’m looking forward to this. A sentence or two later: “Kim actually thinks Liz is demon possessed… Tonight I wondered if Kim might actually be onto something.” I have the feeling Caitlin has never seen anyone be truly angry before!And then Liz says: “Well, I’ll admit [reading your diary] was wrong. But then we know that I’m the bad girl here, don’t we? You make that perfectly clear in your diary. Oh, poor little Caitlin, the darling saint who has to room with the evil Liz… And the fact is, I’m really not all that surprised by what I read. You’re exactly who I thought you were—a freaked-out religious hypocrite!”I agree with Liz completely! Caitlin is not exactly charitable in her diary, although she tries to mask this with high-and-mightyness and uses Christianity as a way to excuse her bad behavior. But then, Caitlin says: “I don’t know how you can call me a hypocrite. What I write in my diary is the truth—for me anyway—it’s how I feel at the time.” Liz responds with: “You don’t think it’s hypocritical for someone to go around acting like she’s all sweetness and light… and then to write nasty and vicious things about someone else in her diary!”This goes back and forth for a while, with Caitlin refusing to understand exactly why what she wrote about Liz was wrong and going back to the argument of “But waahhh, you READ MY DIARY!!” again and again. And then, later, she actually has the AUDACITY to say: “Anyway, I know you probably don’t even care, but I forgive you for trespassing into my space.”This is literally the worst, most awful non-purposefully-badly-written protagonist I have ever come across in my life, and God help Melody Carlson if she actually thinks Caitlin is a good role model for teenage girls.Unsurprisingly, Caitlin later admits: “I don’t remember anyone ever warning me that life is supposed to be hard.” Yup, I figured that little tidbit about you out on my own. Caitlin is so ridiculously devout, she even says it worries her she enjoys hearing from her boy toy Josh so much because she wants to love God the most. This book honestly is quite scary. Blah, blah, blah. Caitlin goes home for the holidays, comes back and doesn’t hear from Liz for a long time. And honestly I hope Liz stays the hell away from Caitlin because in this relationship, both of them are toxic, but Caitlin is probably the worse person. Eventually Caitlin calls Liz’s mom – a devout Christian apparently, which gets her and Caitlin all chummy with one another. Then Liz comes back and is angry with Caitlin for getting her parents involved, and Caitlin describes this as: “And then Liz just stomped on me! Or spit in my face! Or slapped me!” Yup, that’s totes what happened, you go girl.And then Caitlin thinks she has insight into what’s “wrong” with Liz: Liz is so angry because she threw God away and now she “knows what she’s missing”. Okay.Eventually Caitlin buys a Christmas present for Liz, which of course changes Liz’s mind and heart and then it emerges that Liz is the way she is because, of course, of sexual abuse. Of course! And then Liz and Caitlin have a heartfelt talk about God and Liz gets “fixed” and Caitlin and her roommate are just chummy as anything now. Is this the real life? Of course it’s not.Blah, blah, blah. Josh gets Caitlin a “covenant ring” which must be like the Duggar version of an engagement ring in an unholy alliance with a promise ring. Later, Caitlin begins to feel a “barrier between her and God” as if her Christian-as-anything “covenant ring” is the Epitome of Worldly Evil instead of the most Christian thing I’ve ever heard of in my life. So, she decides to write a difficult letter to Josh effectively breaking up with him, for absolutely no reason at all that she’s explained, other than this mysterious “barrier”. Later she describes breaking up with Josh as “pulling the weed from my heart” which must mean that her worries from earlier about loving Josh more than God have finally come to fruition, which is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard about, and if this was an actual thing, no Christian would actually get married.The book finishes with Caitlin “spending the day alone with God” and writing a poem, and then with a “personal note from Caitlin” asking if you feel God nudging at your heart to give up sex, and if you do, please write down your promise on this handy dandy little Promise Card. Okay.I hate this book. I literally bought it so I could finish it at home and write up all the terrible quotes I so despise from it. I hate its protagonist. I hate the way she treats people. I hate the way her relationship with God pushes all others out of her life and encourages its teen readers to do the same. I hate the way Melody Carlson has used this terrible, terrible girl to be a role model to teen girls as to the way they should treat people. Most of all, I hate the way Caitlin is shown to be flawed – which would be fine, if she had actually apologized for her flaws – but then never makes anything right with Liz, things magically repair themselves without her ever having to apologize for the things she wrote in her diary calling Liz a moron and an idiot, etc, and basically tells teen girls that all people who seem standoffish must have been “damaged” and need to be fixed, and that you don’t need to apologize to anyone for anything, because they only hate you because they’re “damaged”, not because you called them an idiot and a moron! I hate this book! The end!One star!
On My Own is the fourth book in the Diary of a Teenage Girl Caitlin series and gets a little more intense as it goes along. By more intense I mean that Caitlin and one of her good friends Jenny get into a big fight about body image. Here is the good part... Caitlin is now in COLLEGE! Now Caitlin is free to do whatever she wants to do! That is until Caitlin`s vicious roommate Elizabeth Banks gets on her nerve with going out late at night with her boyfriend or at some kind of drug party. While that is going on Caitlin still has her commitment to God not to date. Could this be the year that that gets thrown away? Caitlin also has to keep on top of her good grades too I mean, this is college! Around Christmas Caitlin also stops at her parents house and on other occasions. Caitlin also tells herself that this is not high school anymore and that she won`t live in her normal house ever again. After On My Own come my favorite book in the series which is the last book! I hope everyone enjoys the fourth Caitlin book!
What do You think about On My Own (2002)?
The whole "engagement" thing caught me off guard. It seemed kinda weird the way she threw it in there and yanked it back out 50 pages later. To teach her a lesson? Probably, but I still think it's odd. (Still liked the book though.)
—Emma Thurman
