by JULIET WATERS

This has to be the ultimate teen fantasy. You take an after-school writing class with a teacher who publishes a small press. He likes your journal/rantings enough to publish them in a chapbook. You've been careful not to use anyone's actual names. Instead you make up labels like Wonka Boy, Braid Bitch, Vegan Grrl, and (to describe your French teacher) Midwestern Tackiness. Inevitably, you get called into the vice-principal's office. She tells you something you've written about one of your teachers could be considered libel, advises you to stop printing the chapbook, be more careful about what you write in the future, and prohibits it from the school.

Before you've even graduated high school, however, the chapbook has come to the attention of a major publisher who'll be offering you a $100,000 advance to expand it into a memoir. But that isn't why you tell the V.P. to go fuck herself. You would have done it anyway because that's the kind of attitude that makes you the freakish, and now rich, prodigy you are.

Believe it or not, this is the true story of Zoe (not her real last name) Trope, a 15 year old from Oregon, and author of Please Don't Kill the Freshman, a collection of cryptic, poetic, angry, self-absorbed, weird, incisive, mundane and talented journal entries spanning March 2001 to June 2002. There's not much in the way of plot or character development, but over the course of about 300 pages you can detect the story of an ordinary and not-so-ordinary teenager. She's an A student, a somewhat fanatical lefty, who plays trombone in the high school band, a significant proportion of which is gay. This isn't gay as in nerdy, but gay, as in gay or at least bisexual. In fact most of her friends are gay, and so is she, sort of.

She gets crushes on girls, or her gay male friends, though she spends a lot of time necking with a cross dresser named Curry. Whenever she finds herself attracted to a guy, she hates herself for being such a "faggot." When she does find love, her girlfriend decides she'd rather be a boy and starts strapping down her breasts and stuffing socks down her jeans. It's a mixed-up world, but hey, it beats teen pregnancy. Take away the codes and the fashion and the new ways of subversiveness, however, and basically it's every high school, an intense mixture of playfulness, cruelty, bullying, lameness, bullshit, opportunity and lack thereof.

The book version is an expansion of the chapbook, so these journals also include the story of having her chapbook published by her mentor, endearingly referred to here as "Greasy Buddy Holly." As though trying to figure out the difficult world of high school isn't hard enough, Zoe has to wrestle with the intimidating prospect of having to act like a mature writer in the world of readings, socializing with people who are a good decade older than she. This is obviously not something that's going to get easier when she's confronting a life of book tours and interviews, over-the-top reviews by authors like Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, and masses of negative reviews from mainstream reviewers who are looking for something a little more accessible.

Reading Please Don't Kill the Freshman, it's quite obvious why 15 year olds don't get published very often. There's enough raw talent in here to impress anyone, but there's also enough immaturity to annoy almost everyone. This writer has no nostalgia to blunt the awfulness and isn't capable of the humour that comes with retrospection. Every pain is given equal weight. It's just raw experience told by someone who has a gift for vivid detail, and occasional insight. She has a lot of power, but little wisdom. She may very well be a great writer some day, but despite all the hype, isn't right now. If you can overlook all that, however, you have to admit, in theory, it's still a great fantasy.

Please Don'T Kill the Freshman: A Memoir by Zoe Trope, Harper Collins, hc, 296 pp, $23.99