The Carrie Diaries: Bushnell Needs To Rewatch 'Sex and the City'

Candace Bushnell really should have re-watched Sex and the City before she embarked on writing her prequel "The Carrie Diaries".

I was a late-comer to the Sex and the City hype, but since the series ended in 2004, I have watched every episode at least a dozen times (my guilty pleasure is popping the DVDs every night before bed). So you could imagine my excitement when I found out Bushnell was giving SATC loyalists a inside look at Carrie Bradshaw's life before she moved to New York.

Overall, the two books were a fun flash-back to the 80's, where young Carrie Bradshaw was experiencing her first love-triangle, dealing with the death of her mom and developing her writing.

But for the true SATC zealot, there were several discrepancies in the young-adult novels that were difficult to look past.

• In the books, teenage Carrie had a panache for cooking, which couldn't be father from the truth for adult Carrie, who had a habit of storing her shoes in her oven.
• Carrie doesn't lose her virginity until the summer after her senior year in high school in the books, but in the series she tells Samantha that she had sex in her junior year of high school with Seth Bateman.
• In the series Carrie very briefly mentioned that her father left her family when she was a child, but her dad has a very big presence in the books.
• In the second book, "Summer and the City," Carrie takes a writing class at the New School where she meets rich-kid Capote Duncan, who she ends up losing her virginity to at the end of the book. In the pilot episode of SATC, Charlotte goes on a date with a Capote Duncan. We can only assume these aren't the same Capote Duncans.
• Let's not even get into how Bushnell introduced Carrie to her future friends Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte. In the second Sex and the City movie, we find out in a flashback that Carrie meets Charlotte on a subway, Miranda in a department store and Samantha when she is a bartender. In "Summer and the City," after arriving in New York City Carrie's purse is stolen and she calls her friend's cousin, who turns out to be Samantha, for help. Bushnell stayed true to Carrie meeting Miranda in front of a department store as Miranda protests one cause or another. Carrie meets young Charlotte in the last pages of the book on a train back to Manhattan.

I clearly didn't read "The Carrie Diaries" looking for brilliant writing, so the least Bushnell could have given me was a story that jived with the rest of the series.

But despite these discrepancies, "The Carries Diaries" and "Summer and the City" were still fun reads, and hope Bushnell continues with the series (as long as she does her homework first).