The narrative follows the progress of twenty-year-old Jenny Bunn, who has moved from her family home in the North of England to a small town not far from London to teach primary school children.

Jenny is a 'traditional' Northern working-class girl whose dusky beauty strikes people as being at odds with the old-fashioned values she has gained from her upbringing, not least the conviction of 'no sex before marriage'.

The rest of the novel relates, from Jenny's point of view, the progress of her relationship with Patrick, her activities as a new teacher, getting to know the people around her, and a string of incidents such as a visit to Julian's house, a date with Graham and Dick making a clumsy pass at her in the kitchen.

From Patrick's point of view Amis describes his activities at school, his outlook on life and the escapades that follow his meeting the urbane Julian Ormerod, who has a big house in the countryside near the town.

Rabinovitz writes of these neo-realist writers that Their styles are plain, their time-sequences are chronological, and they make no use of myth, symbol or stream-of-consciousness inner narratives.To bring the world of the novel as close as possible to the physical world of the reader, Amis takes great care to describe in great detail, in what appear to be a series of entirely incidental details; for example, the minutiae of the lodging house are meticulously (and humorously) described: [The kitchen] door had another little brass knocker on it, this time representing a religious-looking person on a donkey.

A medium-sized woman with reddish hair and a purple dress was doing something to the stove but stopped when they came in.The plot of Take a Girl Like You follows traditional realistic conventions and has been compared to that of Clarissa (Samuel Richardson, 1748).

It starred Hayley Mills, Oliver Reed, Sheila Hancock, Ronald Lacey, John Bird, Noel Harrison, Aimi MacDonald and Penelope Keith.