Literary Devices in Story of a Girl
Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Setting
Quick—picture the most dead-end, economically depressed, suburban town you can think of. Give it a few strip malls with stores that are either going out of business or should have closed a long t...
Narrator Point of View
Reading Deanna's narration is a lot like chilling at the fancy Taco Bell on the beach, sharing secrets over an order of Nachos Bell Grande. She tells her story like she's talking to a peer. For exa...
Genre
Young Adult LiteratureThis one's pretty obvious: the main character is a teenager, all her friends (except her boss at the pizza place) are teenagers, and the book was a finalist for the National B...
Writing Style
Reading Story of a Girl feels a lot like talking to your best friend, especially if your best friend is totally angst-ridden and conflicted. Like most teens, Deanna uses plenty of slang. Just look...
What's Up With the Title?
We learn about the title in the fourth paragraph. The night Deanna's dad catches her and Tommy in the car, Deanna says:[…] in my head I wrote the story of a girl who surfed the cold green ocean,...
What's Up With the Ending?
Story of a Girl ends kind of ambiguously, with a short chapter in which Deanna goes back to Terra Nova for the first day of junior year. She's written Lee a letter asking her to meet in front of th...
Tough-o-Meter
Story of a Girl is a brief, fast-paced book; it's right around two hundred pages, depending on your edition. Deanna Lambert tells us her story in first person, using the casual tone of our best hig...
Plot Analysis
So, About that Buick…Talk about a story that dives right into the tough stuff: Deanna's in the backseat with Tommy in the first sentence. When her dad finds her, you might think we've gone straig...
Trivia
They really do call it Pathetica.And people really do hang out at the Denny's. (Source)There really is a Pigeon Point Lighthouse. This is where Darren and Deanna think Stacy may have gone when she...
Steaminess Rating
Story of a Girl could pretty much be renamed Story of a Girl Who Has Unfortunate Sex. If MTV made a few changes to the format of Teen Mom, like showing us the teen moms' lives through the eyes of a...
Allusions
Lord of the Flies Metallica David Letterman