Welcome to Planet Janet, a diary lying somewhere between Adrian Mole and Bridget Jones.  Janet Bandry’s musings about her life, family, friends and the total unfairness of the entire universe are realistic, self-obsessed, and very, very funny. 

Janet is 16 years old and heading into the summer vacation.  Everyone seems to be falling in love except her.  Her mother (MC, the Mad Cow) has a new boyfriend (Buskin’ Bob) who has feral children in tow, her best friend Disha has pinched the Australian waiter Janet fancied, her father (Sigmund the psychotherapist) is going mad trying to teach her to drive, and her Nan gets arrested at peace rallies.  No-one, she feels, can ever have suffered like her! 

As we only hear Janet’s voice through the 6 months of the diary, her point of view obviously controls the story.  But as Planet Janet is clearly the centre of her own universe (to the exclusion of all others!), we can see through her wild misinterpretations to a pretty normal story of growing up and dealing with other people.   

The driving episodes are especially funny for the reader to picture.  Faced with an unexpected hazard in traffic, Janet simply informs her father “But I don’t do roundabouts” assuming that solves the problem.  Once on the roundabout, she is not able to get off – “I was actually DIZZY by the time I made a break for it (and you should have heard all the horns honking then!)”. 

A project writing an advice column for the school newspaper gives her even more opportunity to leap to conclusions and solve problems other people did not even know they had.  When things finally start to sort themselves out, she sails on regardless, hardly noticing that she has picked up a boyfriend. 

Planet Janet in Orbit is a sequel to the original diary, Planet Janet.  Both are delightful explorations of a teenage view of the world.

Review by David Beagley

© 2005 David Beagley