Saturday, July 22, 2006

5 reasons you should read Retainer Girl

5 reasons you should read Retainer Girl, which is available at Amazon and most other online bookstores, including the German Amazon and the British Amazon:


1. There are almost no books which really describe what having braces is like, and Retainer Girl is all about what it's like having braces - and retainers and even headgear.

2. Retainer Girl isn't just about having braces. It's a real novel about being a teenager, with Lauren looking both back and ahead and describing all the other changes she is going through. Getting the braces off is just the most obvious change, a new freedom that also poses new challenges. The retainers she gets are a more flexible holding stage, and help her with the more difficult decisions she has to begin thinking about making.

3. Retainer Girl is also a bit of an orthodontic fantasy. The world it describes is one where braces are a slightly bigger deal than the real one and Dr.Wrighting is a slightly more intense (but very nice) orthodontist. There's some orthodontic fantasy of longer and more involved treatements, some of which might make the braces experiences readers have had not seem so bad after all.

4. Retainer Girl is honest about the difficulties of having braces - the pain and discomfort, the concern about how you look, the teasing. Lauren goes through all of that and more, sharing the entire experience of having braces with the reader.

5. Dr.Wrighting is better and worse than any orthodontist you know. Almost all her patients wind up really liking her (as much as one can like an orthodontist), but most of them have to wear more embarrassing and bulkier devices than most orthodontists would insist on, and they have to wear them for a longer time. All Dr.Wrighting cares about is that the treatment is a success, not that the braces are as little of an inconvenience as possible to patients. Retainer Girl is just the first in a series of novels about Dr.Wrighting's patients, and you'll want to read all of them to see all the things she does !

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