Search - Smashed : Story of a Drunken Girlhood

I didn't finish the book... I quit reading at page 209. I was expecting this book to be more of a cautionary tale of how excessive drinking can be damaging to young women. Maybe if I had kept reading, I would have gotten to that part. But the first 200 pages were nothing more than a girl with low self-esteem recounting her drunken escapades. I found it very difficult to like Koren or feel any empathy for her.

An honest, hard look at alcohol abuse. I saw in Koren bits of myself, and many a past friend. Heck, parts of it even made me miss getting drunk, but mostly it makes me realize how easy it is and how acceptable society makes it for anyone to abuse alcohol. I think it's a great book that everyone should read.

I thought this book was awesome. I read it very quickly and always looked forward to getting time to read it. The author and many of her friends reminded me so much of so many of my peers. All teenagers should read this book! It is both an entertaining and heartfelt memoir as well as a cautionary tale on the "harmless" binge drinking fad running rampant in so many high schools and colleges in our country.

An affecting memoir. Zailckas does well in her description of her addiction and the escalation from normal college student to alcoholic. Enjoyed the book enough to pick up her next book at a bookstore!

Kept me interested, although the writing was somewhat juvenile but I was still entertained. Koren tells her story of her journey through drinking for most of her life and if you began at an early age it is easy to relate to.

This book was rather depressing. It also wasn't the tale against underaged drinking that I thought it'd be. Yes, Koren is honest about the various consequences of her behavior, and mixes her honesty with true facts about underaged and college drinking that she researched, but that's where it ends. You get a girl with low self-esteem telling you the story of how she got into using alcohol, and used it as a crutch for several years, relying on it to enable her to have the social and professional life she imagined she wanted. Meanwhile, she also tells you about her blackouts, getting sick in the toilet (or not in the toilet), hangovers, and other consequences (the boys especially). While reading this book may scare someone into questioning their behavior, there's also very much a theme throughout the book that almost makes this behavior seem normal. This is partially a consequence of wanting to give the reader honesty and facts. While this is a good thing, it partly backfires, since it certainly makes it seem like everybody her age was and is drinking like this, and consequently makes it hard to use as an argument against drinking, no matter how honestly the negatives are portrayed. Nobody likes being the odd man out.