Gr8 Nuz 4 U

Young people don't read, or so it is said. How to reach the young adult and teen market? Over at Hodder Headline Ireland, they may have found the answer.

Only 18 years of age, but Ruth Gilligan is a novelist. Her debut novel, Forget, is about to be released in a rather posh area of Co. Dublin where she lives. Don't bother trying to read it if you aren't literate in text message speak - because that's how the book's been written.

The plot revolves around love and the teenagers who inhabit Ms. Gilligan's select world, a place of privilege and private schools. In fact, the novel started out as a school project, in which she had eight months to finish up a fifty page writing assignment but decided to keep going and pen an entire novel.

Ms. Gilligan is no slouch, I'll have you know. She's been an actress on a popular Irish soap opera, plays piano and writes music. Granted, writing a novel is a whole different game, but she had a copy of How to Write Your Novel to turn to when she got into a bind. Like most first-time writers, she ended up with a five hundred page brick, but thanks to a friend of the family, she was put in the capable hands of an editor at Hodder Headline Ireland to tweak and prune the manuscript. Patricia Scanlan is also an author as well as an editor, and we can readily assume that her work with Ms. Gilligan involved more than the occasional comma removal. Imagine how far you could go if you had a friend to put you in touch with an editor at a major publishing house.

The characters speak like Ms. Gilligan and her friends, lending that much needed air of realism that might appeal to readers of her age. There's lots of teen angst of the type that results from living a well-heeled life where family squabbles are hidden behind gates and walls, a sort of voyeurism that could lead to sales.

As for the future, the debut novelist is hard at work on her second book, and credits the publication of Forget with getting her into the English program at Cambridge. Now why does this sound like Kaavya Viswanathan with an Irish brogue?