Review: The Secret Loves of Geek Girls by Hope Nicholson

Genre: Comic, Anthology

Similar to: Like an old fashioned Annual but without the puzzles

Could be enjoyed by: Geeks!

Publication date: 9th December 2015

The Secret Loves of Geek Girls is a non-fiction anthology of prose, comics and illustrations from lots of different contributors (including Margaret Atwood and Marjorie Lin) about their own personal experiences of love. The contributors are super diverse, so there’s stories of queerness, asexuality, polyamory, unrequited love, love of fictional characters, friendships…pretty much every type of relationship that you can think of from people of all different backgrounds. With all of the contributors being self confessed geeks, the stories reference various nerdy pastimes such as fandoms, cosplay and online gaming, with overarching themes of not fitting in, not being interested in traditional “girl” stuff, being an awkward obsessive with a whole secret life that no-one else gets. Stuff that I think a lot of us can relate to.

However…

There was something that didn’t quite click with me and this book. I’m not sure if it was because I found it to be quite US/Canada centric or because I’d never had any kind of super intense relationship with a book/film/comic but I couldn’t see myself reflected in any of the stories. Yes, I could relate to some of the more general themes but because the contributions were so specific it was difficult to see my own brand of geeky weirdness being represented. 

I loved the diversity of the contributors and the attempts to be as broad in scope as possible but I did feel like this resulted in a bit of a mish mash of topics. I think the problem is that the world of geekery is so vast that trying to collect individual experiences and collating them without a strong central theme, or grouping them into sub-topics or whatever was always going to result in quite a jarring reading experience. 

Another issue for me was the short story format that was the basis of the book. Many of the contributions featured such niche interests that for someone outside of that world it could be a little confusing. Some of the terms used were unfamiliar to me and at times I didn’t quite understand what was going on.

Overall, I think that this is a classic case of great for you, but not for me. I’m sure that if you’ve got a particular geeky interest and you see yourself reflected in some of the stories then you’ll absolutely love it, but as someone who hasn’t experienced that world I didn’t quite connect.

Rating: Two and a half “wtf does that mean?” out of five.

 A mixed bag of stories made for a slightly jarring but nonetheless interesting reading experience. I’m just not the right target market for the book.