REVIEW: The Brittanys by Brittany Ackerman

Fiction. 272 pgs. Vintage June 2021.  9780593311738.

Oh, to be fourteen again. To experiment with webcams, go out on first dates, and waste time at the mall. To make best friends, fight with them, and make-up only to fight once more. The Brittanys is coming-of-age, universal in that way, and yet, feels very specific to a mid-2000s era that no one should feel nostalgic for—except of course, those of us who were teenagers then.

What Brittany Ackerman achieves in a mundane novel about five teenage girls named Brittany—and really, it’s mostly about two of them—is capture the absurdity of female adolescence. Periods, lip gloss, boys, trips to the mall, hair-dye, parties, stuffed bras, permit tests, weed, sexual expectations, and of course, social dread are too much for one grown man to type, let alone bear at our most vulnerable ages. Yet, the novel is captivating and brilliantly wields the angst of our youth into something compelling and impossible to put down.

Our main Brittany, our narrator, is rapidly approaching her fifteenth birthday, and yet, hasn’t managed to get her period yet. So unlike the Brittanys and other girls around her, she can’t quite call herself a woman and she does an even worse job at playing like one. She isn’t sexy, she’s cute. She’s boy-crazy and everybody knows it. Unlike most of her peers, she hasn’t smoked pot yet and won’t until she and her best friend do it together—that is, if they can remain best friends.

She is an everyman, even for us men. Just as Cady in Mean Girls struggles to navigate and adapt to the wilderness of high school, narrator Brittany loses the girl she used to be as she desperately searches for the woman she will become. It’s heartbreaking for all of us, but a good reminder of how maddening it can be for young teenagers.

One of the more impactful tools wielded by Brittany Ackerman are the italic reflections we get from present-day Brittany, who is, like our author, a writer. In a counter-intuitive, yet clever choice, 2004 Brittany is written in present tense, so when these reflections occasionally appear after a scene, we are swept up in how silly the stakes were when we were teenagers, yet how very heavy and real they felt to us. Projecting “cool”—whether from ourselves or onto other people—is a timeless folly, one that seems to work for others but will never work for ourselves, and as witness, the secondhand embarrassment is difficult to bear. So when present-day Brittany offers her reflections, reminds us that the growing pains didn’t kill her, we are offered much-needed relief, and the embarrassment turns charming in its own way.

The Brittanys is a novel about all of us, no matter who and where you were in 2004. Whether you remember setting up your first webcam and deliberating your away message on AIM or can’t remember life before FaceTime, we all remember what it was like to lose who we used to be, to break, as necessary, to discover who we’ll become.