Sugar Rush tells the story of 15-year-old Kim Lewis, who is a bit square but also - wouldn't you know it? - a mite sardonic. She goes to a posh school, the kind where 'even if you're thin, you've got to be on a diet', and hangs out with a girl who has so much sex, she keeps a box of Fetherlite in her school bag. ... Thanks to [her mum] Stella's departure, belts must be tightened in the Lewis household and she is dispatched to Varndean Comp (does anyone really refer to their school as 'comp'? I know I didn't). There, she meets and falls in love with Maria Sweet, aka 'Sugar', queen of the ravers. ...

Burchill might be able to 'write the backside off her contemporaries' (copyright the Mirror ) journalistically, but this is a bogus and horribly cynical book. Hard to say what I despise about it most: its tenuous morals or supine prose? Its tracing-paper plot or the tendency of its author to spring into capital letters EVERY TIME SHE HAS SOMETHING FUNNY OR SMART TO SAY? In Julie's world, gay sex appears to be something people do only because straight sex is so vile. Worse, straight girls have barely consensual group sex on car bonnets and love every second of it. But these things would matter far less if the book was well-written. Unfortunately, it isn't. When a character's skin is described as being as 'smooth and sweet as a strawberries-and-cream Chupa Chups', you know the author is simply not concentrating. For Chupa Chups, like Burchill's similes, are so rough they make the roof of a girl's mouth sore.