Secret Scribbled Notebooks -- Joanne Horniman

Action-packed this book is not.  There are two major events:

1.  The narrator's sister has a baby.
2.  The narrator meets a boy.

For real.  If you like a lot of action, this is NOT the book for you.  It isn't a huge exaggeration to say that nothing happens.

But if you're looking for a nice, quiet -- sometimes dreamy -- book with beautiful writing (and the added bonus of an Australian setting), here it is.

Kate O'Farrell gets to know her new notebook here:

You smell (I have just sniffed you) clean and sharp and a bit spicy.  Some books smell of mushrooms, but by the time you have developed that mushroomy odour I will be an old woman.

She loves reading, and the parts about books were my favorite bits -- at one point, she describes her adopted grandmother/mother as a sort of "Miss Havisham in reverse", which I thought was especially nice.  The book bits outshone even the vague romance, but that might be partly because I found the boy -- Alex -- a bit too... something for my tastes.  Precious?  Pretentious?  Deliberately obtuse?  A bit of all three?  Yuck.

Kate is given to flights of fancy that, for some reason, are okay in fictional characters (For more information, please re-visit Anne Shirley -- she's a textbook example of this phenomenon) but would be hideously obnoxious in real life:

I would really like to be a tree.  Not for ever, just for a little while.  A mango perhaps, with lots of sheltering leaves and luscious fruits.