Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye. This week, three picks from authors I’ve enjoyed in the past, each a coming-of-age story.

The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld

Summary: 1991 – Fourteen-year-old Hannah reads about celebrity weddings in magazines while her parents’ marriage is crumbling – maybe somewhere in between the two extremes lie the answers to love’s most bewildering questions. Over the next decade and a half, Hannah finds that the questions become more rather than less complicated.

I’m thinking: Maybe… have I already read it?

Reasons to be Cheerful by Nina Stibbe

Summary: Lizzie Vogel leaves her alcoholic, novel-writing mother and heads for Leicester to work for a racist, barely competent dentist. And so begins her adult life, where her driving instructor becomes her best friend; her first boyfriend prefers birdwatching to sex and where independence for a teenage girl might be another word for loneliness.

I’m thinking: No.

Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls

Summary: 1997 – Charlie Lewis is the kind of boy you don’t remember in the school photograph. His exams have not gone well, and if he thinks about the future at all, it is with a kind of dread. Then he meets Fran Fisher and despite himself, Charlie begins to hope.

I’m thinking: Yes (hopefully as good as One Day).