Let me start the review of "Girl Code" by saying that I went into this book fully aware that it is not my type of a book. Over the years many people, mostly my mother and female friends, tried to push various self-development books on me. I detest them. There is nothing else that can put me quicker to sleep or annoy me to the point of throwing the book across the room (something that I more often than not imagine doing but have actually never done) than a book telling me who and what I should or should not be. Part of this is a bit irrational, as I do enjoy learning about other people’s experiences, especially if it is on a topic that I am interested in.

I learned about this book by Cara from her podcast named “Style Your Mind”, which was mentioned and recommended by the self-published author Kristen Martin (whom I got the privilege to finally meet in person at BookCon). Kristen is someone who I admire and look up to when it comes to organization and being a self-published author - she has a youtube channel and her vlogs are my favourite videos! She mentioned Cara’s podcast, and even though, like I said before, I am not into this type of thing, I went to iTunes and listened to several of her episodes in quick succession. (I was deep cleaning my apartment and her podcasts made this tedious task more bearable.)

I liked Cara’s energy and her message about empowering women. I liked what she was saying about her life, how she never had a privileged childhood, but she crafted her life to where she is right now. I liked her way to putting ideas into simple statements. Cara is a life coach and a self-published author, and only recently her self-published novel, "Girl Code", was reprinted by the traditional publisher. I decided to give that book a go, since it was the only novel available at my library.

"Girl Code" is extremely short and extremely easy to read. In fact, I found it so simplistic, that I almost felt as if I was reading the scripts to Cara’s podcast. It is not necessarily a bad thing. But for someone like me, who relishes reading complicated prose, it was a bit too simplified at times.

Besides her own advices and coaching, Cara’s book also has interviews with other empowering women, interspersed by quotes by famous women. I liked some of them, others I found a bit ‘meh’.

Overall, I think this book is great for picking you up if you are in some sort of a funk, but I would not call it ‘groundbreaking’ or ‘empowering’ or ‘inspiring’, and definitely the rating of over 4 stars on GoodReads is a bit surprising (I feel as if it is more of a reflection on Cara’s personality than her writing ability). It was not bad, but there were a lot of things that I could not, personally, relate to. And it is fine. If you are interested in being an entrepreneur or if you want to hear from women who came through a lot of hardships but stayed true to themselves - give this one a try. It is a very short book and I read half of it while getting my pedicure done (which was the appropriate amount of attention this book required from me).

Personal rating: 3 stars

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