Philip Kemp a Film Critic in London reviewed "Paperclips and Petulance" .

Here's what he had to say:

It's not so easy being sixteen. Not if it’s the mid-70s and you're living in a drab little nowhere town in the dullest reaches of the Thames Valley. Not if your dad spends his time slumped in an armchair watching crap television, your older brother's a vacuous slob whose sole interest is steam trains, and your mum's immediate reaction to any request you make is to turn puce in the face and tell you It's Not Necessary.

Other girls, like your friend Tina, are happily having more sex than a warrenful of bunnies. But the boys you fancy never seem to notice you, the ones who do show an interest you wouldn't touch with a second-hand job lot of bargepoles, and the only erotic attention you're getting comes from your Gran's pee-stained, pampered poodle who humps your leg whenever he gets the chance. Doesn't help that your tits seem to have renounced all further ambition somewhere around the training-bra stage – and that your hair, instead of being sleek and blonde like in the magazines, doggedly insists on remaining brown and frizzy.

Meanwhile, Mother and Father have decided you need A Good Job. Good, apparently, meaning Junior Secretary with a firm of Chartered Accountants where the partners are all overdue for Zimmer-frames and the female staff sport blue-rinses and an aversion to outrageous modernisms like 'OK'. And your duties include washing out the polystyrene cups from the coffee machine so they can be used a few more times. After all, can't have waste, can we?

So, being young and ambitious, you move on. (Well, actually you get the sack, but let's not quibble over details.) To the local Tax Office. Where you wind up sharing an office with Mad Mabel, who obsessively reuses teabags, hanging them out to dry in between dunkings, and insists on showing you the bruises on her upper thighs. And if you try to object your boss, Creepy Clive, tells you you're a Trouble Maker.

Still, even in the Poo Pile of Life there are a few bright spots. Like Mr and Mrs Armstrong next door who, in complete contrast to Mother and Father, are always happy to see you, adore each other's company and dance together in their kitchen. There's the occasional evening down the table-tennis club, where the guys treat you as a rather cheeky mascot. And then there's Chris, who's devastatingly handsome and might just be persuaded to take an interest in you if – on Tina's advice – you kit yourself out with some agonisingly ultra-tight orange flared pants (£12.99 from the Kays Catalogue).

Jan Jack's novel is a hilarious, brilliantly detailed and devastatingly honest account of the rare joys and multiple anguishes of adolescence – not as it's commonly depicted but as it really is. No one who can remember what it was like to be a teenager – and who would rather stick pins in their eyes than relive that period of their life – can fail to laugh, groan and shudder in recognition.