Review: I'M GLAD MY MOM DIED by Jennette McCurdy

 

I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor—including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother—and how she retook control of her life.

Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,” eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?” She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I’m Glad My Mom Died , Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly , she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!”), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.

--- 

So, I was kind of reluctant to read this memoir when I first heard about it (though knowing nothing about the book) as I didn't like the title. It felt clickbait-y to me, and I just didn't like that at all. But then I got it from the library, and wow. Jennette McCurdy had such a difficult childhood as a child actress. She was forced into this work by her mum and abused for years by her. Reading this was difficult. McCurdy's story is traumatic and complicated. I really do applaud her for writing this.

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Review: BUNNY by Mona Awad

 

Bunny by Mona Awad
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Vegetarian meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel about a lonely graduate student drawn into a clique of rich girls who seem to move and speak as one

"We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?"

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, a caustic art school dropout, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the sinister yet saccharine world of the Bunny cult and starts to take part in their ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they magically conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur, and her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies are brought into deadly collision.

A spellbinding, down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, creativity and agency, and friendship and desire, Bunny is a dazzlingly original second book.

---

Oh, wow. This book. THIS BOOK!

Joining a cult while studying your MFA in creative writing? A cult where you summon monsters? This was the perfect book for me to read while finishing my MFA in creative writing.

The writing is just so trippy, so psychedelic, and it's the exact kind of horror I love. And I don't even want to say any more than that, because I think going into this book with no idea or expectations about it meant I had the best reading experience possible.

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Review: ANY OTHER FAMILY by Eleanor Brown

 

Any Other Family by Eleanor Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

he New York Times bestselling author of The Weird Sisters returns with a striking and intimate new novel about three very different women facing an impossible question: What makes a family?

They look just like any other family. But they aren't a family like any other – not quite. Instead, they are three sets of parents who adopted four biological siblings, committing to keeping the children connected after the death of their grandmother.



Tabitha, who adopted the twins, is the planner of the group, responsible for coordinating playdates and birthdays and Sunday night dinners, insistent that everything happens just so. Quiet and steady Ginger, single mother to the eldest daughter, resists the forced togetherness, her own unsettled childhood leaving her wary of trusting too much. And Elizabeth is still reeling from going directly from failed fertility treatments into adopting a newborn, terrified that her unhappiness means she was not meant to be a mother at all.

But when the three women receive a surprising call from their children’s birth mother, announcing she is pregnant again and wants them to help her find an adoptive family for this child too, the delicate bonds they are still struggling to form threaten to collapse. As tensions rise, the women reckon with their own feelings about what it means to be a mother and what they owe each other as a family.

Set across the span of a family vacation, one full of boisterous laughter and emotional upheaval, Any Other Family is a thought-provoking and poignant look at how families shift and evolve and a striking portrait of motherhood in all its forms.

--

I don't normally read contemporary fiction like this, but I'm really glad I did. It has a slower pace to what I'm used to, but the character portraits in this are phenomenal. I honestly can't get over that. They're so, so good. Like, it's all close-third person, being narrated by the three main women, and each feels so distinct. I was particularly impressed with how different Elizabeth's narrative voice was. Because this takes skill.

I read this when I was having a miscarriage, and surprisingly, reading a book all about motherhood was actually really cathartic and soothing.

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Review: ME VS BRAIN by Hayley Morris

 

Me vs Brain: An Overthinker’s Guide to Life by Hayley Morris
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Brain: We left the oven on!
Me: No don't say that, I've not got time for this!
Brain: The house is probably on fire!
Me: Stop it, I need to write this book description.
Brain: But the blazing fire.
Me: We didn't even use the oven today.
Brain: But what if -
Me: No. We're not doing this, I'm finishing this description.

Hello there! Hayley Morris here. Or you might know me as the Brain Girl, and don't be fooled...it's not because I'm outrageously smart. Just an avid overthinker. I'm on a mission to prove once and for all that You. Are. Normal. Running through imaginary arguments whilst showering, hiding your knickers in the nurse's office before they look directly into your vagina, or not knowing how to be a normal human when you have the plumber over. I've spent the majority of my life saying and doing embarrassing things that wake me up in a cold sweat at 3am as my Brain reminds me of every minor detail.

In this book, I've overthought absolutely everything so you don't have to. I'll be talking about everything from dating to discharge, mental health to menstrual cups. I might not be able to banish your anxiety or make you feel 100% comfortable in your skin, but I hope I can at least give you a break from the constant brain chatter and we can rejoice and laugh at how similar we actually all are.

---

I follow Hayley Morris on Instagram and think the videos she makes are wonderful, so I was interested in reading this as soon as it came out. And it's the first book I've read in a long time that I devoured in less than 24 hours.

This is a wonderful memoir-style book, and it's great for people like me who've got anxiety as it's reassuring. It's normalising so many symptoms of anxiety and saying it's okay to speak about them, it's okay to laugh about them, and it's okay to get help for them.

It's fun, and it's powerful, and it's sad at times too. You'll laugh and cry as you read this.

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Review: GIRL FRIENDS by Holly Bourne

 

Girl Friends by Holly Bourne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Men see women in two separate categories. There are the women they sleep with, and the women they fall in love with. And they will treat you differently based on that."

From the day they first meet as teenagers Fern and Jessica are best friends. Despite their differences, they are there for each other throughout everything, navigating the difficulties of growing up and fitting in. That is until Jessica crosses a line that Fern can't forgive.

But now, more than ten years later, Jessica has unexpectedly reappeared in Fern's life.

A lot has changed for them both - but can their relationship be different now they are older? Is it possible for either of them to rewrite the role that they have been cast in? Or will their shared history ultimately be doomed to repeat itself again?

Set between the present day and the past, GIRL FRIENDS is a blisteringly funny and devastating novel: both a joyful celebration of female friendship and a razor-sharp look at the damage we can all cause to those we claim to love the most.

---

So, I am a massive fan of Holly Bourne's YA novels, and I've been meaning to pick up one of her adult novels for quite a while. So when I discovered I could get a signed copy of Girl Friends, I was so, so excited. And it's... different to what I was expecting.

I was intrigued to see how she delivers a book for an adult readership. There's a lot more contemplation in this book, a slower pace, and more time to explore important themes and topics of debate, such as feminism and the different kinds of friendships. The writing was definitely denser, and structurally, it was a little slower too. We have dual timelines: when Fern is in her thirties, and also Fern as a teenager. These timelines alternate, but even within these timelines, we have some pretty big time gaps between their chapters--this was something that felt noticeably 'adult' to me rather than 'YA', as I'm a YA writer who's now writing for adults as well, it's something that really interested me.

Characterisation, as always with Holly Bourne's books, is great. Seriously great. Every character felt so real, but we could also see their flaws too. They weren't perfect. They felt authentic and genuine, and we could see how no one person was 100% 'all good' or 'all bad'.

This book covers a lot of important topics: sexual assault, rape, peer pressure, drug and alcohol abuse (particularly among teens), self-harm, mental illness, jealousy, and self-esteem issues. I'm probably forgetting some others too, but I'd say the heart of this book is about relationships, both romantic and sexual relationships, and friendships.

This novel makes some pretty strong statements about men and how they act and behave--insinuating that all straight men are like this. Of course, these statements are from the mouth of Jessica, I think, and she's a pretty opinionated character, but we see how these things sit with Fern for years and change the way she looks at her own partner. And of course this makes the reader do this too. One scene in particular made me feel quite uneasy, as I wondered if this would also apply to my husband...

Jessica is also a fantastic character. She's the popular girl at school--but mainly popular among boys for her 'sex uses' and not popular among girls. Fern is pretty much her only friend. Fern feels plain and boring compared to her. Jessica is the one all the boys want. And, across the teen years, Jessica also gets with three boys that Fern is either interested in or with--which really paints Jessica in a not-so-great light. I was right on Fern's side with that, but then the ending twists things magnificently. Jessica points out that each time when this happened, she was either drunk or high and being taken advantage of. She needed help from her girl friends (Fern) but Fern had begun to see her as just the 'slut' that the boys painted her as. And this just really got me thinking, as I fell into this trap too, judging Jessica and thinking she wasn't a great friend.

This book makes you think a lot about society and the way women and girls are programmed to look down upon other women and girls who are perhaps obviously more sexual. But then it makes you think about how men and boys also shape those same women to be more sexual, and opens your eyes to the abuse and sexual assaults that go on there too.

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Review: AFTER THE RAIN by Natalia Gomes

 

After the Rain by Natália Gomes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

'We’re alive. So let’s start living.'

Two strangers

Jack was sporty and outgoing. Alice was bookish and introverted. Their lives were on completely different paths.

One life-changing tragedy

That is before the day they were in the wrong place at the wrong time: before the day their lives were torn apart in a bombing.

A hopeful new friendship

Struggling to cope with their new worlds, their unlikely new friendship helps them find hope. But can they help each other rebuild their lives and start again?

---

This was the first book I got out from the Libby app, and it was a good read. At times, I found the pacing a little slow, but it fits right in with so many other YA novels that examine bombings and terrorism, and the effects these have on the survivors. There's a surprising amount packed in here, and the characterisation was deftly done.

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Review: BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU by Sally Rooney

 

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

---

I struggled with this book, which is odd, because I also rate it highly. To me, this is one of those more experimental writings. It feels very literary, and you have to concentrate a lot to read it. Plot isn't really the point in this story. It's about character--and the characterisation is phenomenal. Rooney really paints vivid pictures of all her characters. They feel real and I felt connected at times to them, but there was also this incredible distance, like I could never truly understand them. And it was this balance between being kept close and being pushed away that really kept me coming back to the story.

The prose was challenging at times. I was in hospital at some of the points when I was dipping into this story, and I did skim-read a lot of the letters in this story, because I found I was preferring the 'present day' action, rather than when Alice and Eileen write to each other. The topics they talk about are quite 'high-brow', and I found some of this difficult to concentrate on, particularly when I wanted a light read and entertainment.

The writing craft is amazing though. There are so many amazing paragraphs to analyse. It's a story about friendship and relationships, about growing up and being an adult, about love and loss and moving forward, about expectations and societal pressure, about climate change and politics, about mental health, and about what it means to be human.

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Review: NEVER SAW ME COMING by Vera Kurian

 

Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurian
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Meet Chloe Sevre. She’s a freshman honor student, a leggings-wearing hot girl next door, who also happens to be a psychopath. Her hobbies include yogalates, frat parties, and plotting to kill Will Bachman, a childhood friend who grievously wronged her.

Chloe is one of seven students at her DC-based college who are part of an unusual clinical study for psychopaths—students like herself who lack empathy and can’t comprehend emotions like fear or guilt. The study, led by a renowned psychologist, requires them to wear smart watches that track their moods and movements.

When one of the students in the study is found murdered in the psychology building, a dangerous game of cat and mouse begins, and Chloe goes from hunter to prey. As she races to identify the killer and put her own plan into action, she’ll be forced to decide if she can trust any of her fellow psychopaths—and everybody knows you should never trust a psychopath.

Never Saw Me Coming is a compulsive, voice-driven thriller by an exciting new voice in fiction, that will keep you pinned to the page and rooting for a would-be killer.

---

Ah, how I wish I reviewed this book as soon as I finished it and not nearly a year later! Because I remember this book was good. Dark secrets, psychopaths (actual, clinically-diagnosed psychopaths, too), unreliable narrators and characters, violence, murder, sexual assault. There's a lot in this book.

Before reading this, I'll confess, I didn't know that much about the clinical diagnosis of psychopathy and what it means to have this diagnosis. I think often the figure of the psychopath is dramatized and over-villainised in popular culture and media, and this was a really interesting read, when two of our narrators were psychopaths involved in a clinical university study into their condition, and a third one was pretending to be a psychopath (I found it interesting how he'd fooled the scientists running the study, but at least one of the others in the study could see right through him).

A lot of the story focuses on Chloe wanting revenge on Will. Her reasons are justified and I found myself routing for her--her lack of guilt or empathy made it a lot easier to route for her, too. I think if this had been a character who wasn't diagnosed as a psychopath, then the lack of guilt may have changed how I viewed her slightly. But Will was an abusive and awful character, and I really felt like Chloe was justified.

Charles is probably the most memorable of the characters, though. He's more thoughtful and contemplative than Chloe, and a lot of the time he's trying to steer his life in a different direction and overcome the social stigma of his diagnosis.

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Review: NANNY NEEDED by Georgina Cross

 

Nanny Needed by Georgina Cross
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A young woman takes a job as a nanny for an impossibly wealthy family, thinking she's found her entre into a better life--only to discover instead she's walked into a world of deception and dark secrets.

Nanny needed. Discretion is of the utmost importance. Special conditions apply.

When Sarah Larsen finds the notice, posted on creamy card stock in her building's lobby, one glance at the exclusive address tells her she's found her ticket out of a dead-end job--and life.

At the interview, the job seems like a dream come true: a glamorous penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side of NYC; a salary that adds several zeroes to her current income; the beautiful, worldly mother of her charge, who feels more like a friend than a potential boss. She's overjoyed when they offer her the position and signs the NDA without a second thought.

In retrospect, the notice in her lobby was less an engraved invitation than a waving red flag. For there is something very strange about the Bird family. Why does the beautiful Mrs. Bird never leave the apartment alone? And what happened to the nanny before her? It soon becomes clear that the Birds' odd behaviors are more than the eccentricities of the wealthy.

But by then it's too late for Sarah to seek help. After all, discretion is of the utmost importance. 

--

I'd been aware of Georgina Cross as an amazing thriller/suspense writer for quite a while, and I'd grabbed a couple of her novels when I saw them in a Bookbub mailing, and I don't know why I hadn't picked up one before now. What prompted me to do so is that I'm currently working on my MFA novel, which is a domestic psychological thriller for adults, and my supervisor has been teaching me methodology for scene structure. His recommendation was to read a handful of novels in my genre and pay attention to pacing, delivery of story beats, and structures. So, I browsed my kindle app and began with Nanny Needed.

I am used to YA thrillers in particular being fast right from the start (as this is what I mainly read and write), and the first thing that struck me about the opening of Nanny Needed is how measured and almost 'careful' it was in its delivery of information. It wasn't until we got to about 20% in that we found out the 'truth' about the child that Sarah is to be nanny for. And this just gave me an aha-moment. It told me what I'd been doing wrong in my adult psych thriller, as I had my first story beat happening at about 5%.

Therefore, as I kept reading, I found that I was plotting out the structure as well, paying attention to the delivery and the pacing. This kind of makes my read seem analytical--but it was also SO MUCH FUN. I could not stop turning the pages. I simply had to know what was going to happen next, and it felt like the author was always one step ahead of me. Just when I thought I was working out what was happening, something else happened that threw me off track--yet, at the end, it all tied together perfectly. And that final twist--I was actually speechless. Never before has a book made me audibly gasp like that and stare around the room wide-eyed. I did NOT see that coming--and yet, I can see all the clues were there. In fact, I'd spotted some of the clues and I knew they were significant for the ending but at the time of encountering them, I just couldn't make sense of them.

The characterisation in this story is amazing. Collette in particular is fantastically written. In fact, every single character is. There's a really strong sense of place too, like I felt I could map out the events onto the specific locations all the time.

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Review: ONE TRUE LOVES by Taylor Jenkins Reid

 

One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In her twenties, Emma Blair marries her high school sweetheart, Jesse. They build a life for themselves, far away from the expectations of their parents and the people of their hometown in Massachusetts. They travel the world together, living life to the fullest and seizing every opportunity for adventure.

On their first wedding anniversary, Jesse is on a helicopter over the Pacific when it goes missing. Just like that, Jesse is gone forever.

Emma quits her job and moves home in an effort to put her life back together. Years later, now in her thirties, Emma runs into an old friend, Sam, and finds herself falling in love again. When Emma and Sam get engaged, it feels like Emma’s second chance at happiness.

That is, until Jesse is found. He’s alive, and he’s been trying all these years to come home to her. With a husband and a fiancé, Emma has to now figure out who she is and what she wants, while trying to protect the ones she loves.

Who is her one true love? What does it mean to love truly?

Emma knows she has to listen to her heart. She’s just not sure what it’s saying.

—-

This is the second Taylor Jenkins Reid book I’ve read, and she’s now a firm favourite author. I absolutely loved her Malibu Rising and this book was even better. I connected to the first person narration so easily, and this is exactly the kind of love story I adore. It’s a story with heart. It’s a story that has the perfect setup and the plot is about learning which choice Emma will make.

This is a story that’s heartbreaking and gut-wrenching, but every choice Emma makes does make sense. I was particularly impressed with how both Jesse and Sam felt like real love interests—they both could be ‘the one’. I found myself rooting for each of them just as much, which meant I shared Emma’s exact dilemma.

I loved how the novel started with the day that Jesse returned, and then we go back in time to see how teenage Emma met and fell in love (in different ways) with both the love interests, Jesse and Sam. We see her travel into adulthood, and there’s so much character growth in this book.

This book is light on the sex, which I really appreciated, instead being much more emotion-based. This has to be one of my favourite reads of 2022.

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Review: THE BOY, THE MOLE, THE FOX, AND THE HOUSE by Charlie Mackesy

 

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Enter the world of Charlie's four unlikely friends, discover their story and their most important life lessons. The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse have been shared millions of times online - perhaps you've seen them? They've also been recreated by children in schools and hung on hospital walls. They sometimes even appear on lamp posts and on cafe and bookshop windows. Perhaps you saw the boy and mole on the Comic Relief T-shirt, Love Wins?

Here, you will find them together in this book of Charlie's most-loved drawings, adventuring into the Wild and exploring the thoughts and feelings that unite us all.

—-

I’d heard so much about this book but never really knew what to expect. Then I discovered I could get the ebook through my library, and I loved it. This story is calming and grounding, and it explores why every person is important and why they matter, even if they feel like they don’t. It’s a great book to gift someone who may be struggling with their mental health or sense of purpose.

The illustrations also reminded me a lot of those in Winnie the Pooh, and a lot of this story relies on or is developed through visual literacy.

Below are my two favourite pages: 

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Review: FAMILY OF LIARS by e. lockhart

 

Family of Liars by E. Lockhart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The prequel to We Were Liars takes readers back to the story of another summer, another generation, and the secrets that will haunt them for decades to come.

A windswept private island off the coast of Massachusetts. 
A hungry ocean, churning with secrets and sorrow.
A fiery, addicted heiress. An irresistible, unpredictable boy. 
A summer of unforgivable betrayal and terrible mistakes.

Welcome back to the Sinclair family. 
They were always liars

— 

Beautiful lyrical prose, as is expected of E. Lockhart, and a wonderful prequel to WE WERE LIARS. Always interesting learning about the previous generation, and the characterisation was masterful. The twists were phenomenal. Complete shockers that I did not see coming. Unreliable narrators (like mother like daughter!), delightful imagery, and a book that speaks so many truths, particularly for the #MeToo movement.

Although this review is short (I’m currently not that well!) this book is an instant favourite.

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Review: IDENTICAL by Ellen Hopkins

 

Identical by Ellen Hopkins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Do twins begin in the womb?
Or in a better place?

Kaeleigh and Raeanne are identical down to the dimple. As daughters of a district-court judge father and a politician mother, they are an all-American family—on the surface. Behind the facade each sister has her own dark secret, and that's where their differences begin.

For Kaeleigh, she's the misplaced focus of Daddy's love, intended for a mother whose presence on the campaign trail means absence at home. All that Raeanne sees is Daddy playing a game of favorites—and she is losing. If she has to lose, she will do it on her own terms, so she chooses drugs, alcohol, and sex.

Secrets like the ones the twins are harboring are not meant to be kept—from each other or anyone else. Pretty soon it's obvious that neither sister can handle it alone, and one sister must step up to save the other, but the question is—who?

—

It’s taken me a little while to write this review, but honestly, this book was amazing. I’m a massive fan of verse novels, and Hopkins has to be one of the best verse novelists I’ve read so far. IDENTICAL is the story of Kaeleigh and Raeanne (I listened to the audiobook so I only just looked up the spelling of their names!), and they are identical twins, but Hopkins really shows how different they are.

The contrasts between them were beautifully done—and that just made the twist at the end all the more powerful. I did not see that coming, and it was expertly done!

This book covers some difficult topics: child sexual abuse at the hands of a parent, death, grief, mental illness (including disordered eating and dissociative personality disorder/multiple personality disorder—I don’t know the correct term, sorry!). But it also looks at positives too: Support of (good) family members, friendships and supportive relationship.

The writing itself is lyrical, poignant, powerful, and stunning. Listening to this was a delight—which is kind of a weird thing to say, given what this story was about. I now recommend this novel to my students as an example of verse storytelling.

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Review: SUGAR by Carly Nugent

 

Sugar by Carly Nugent
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What’s yours is yours for a reason. Luck has nothing to do with it.

Some people get exactly what they deserve. And, as it turns out, I deserve to be called Persephone. No simple-to-sound-out Pride-and-Prejudice-style name like Elizabeth or Jane for me. Nope. Demi had to go Greek. Define ‘Persephone’. Bringer of destruction. That pretty much sums it up.

Persephone is angry. Angry that her life revolves around finger-prick tests, carbohydrate counts and insulin injections. Angry at Alexander Manson. Angry with her mum for lots of things, for nothing and for everything.
But most of all, she’s angry with herself. For deserving it all. Because of what she did, or didn’t do. Because one year ago she did something and her dad died.
But then Persephone finds a body on a bush path, a young woman she doesn’t know but feels a strong connection to. And as she tries to find out what happened to Sylvia, Persephone begins to understand her own place in the complex interconnectedness of the universe.

Sugar is the story of a sixteen-year-old girl trying to make sense of the life-changing events that have sent her world into a spin, her search for a reason behind it all, and ultimately her acceptance of life’s randomness.

—

I am drawn to books about angry girls. Girls who are hurting. Girls who feel like they deserve bad things. And also anything with chronic illness rep. And this is what drew me to Sugar.

Persephone (I love the name!) is angry. Her father died a year ago, and she feels partly responsible. She’s angry that her body doesn’t work—she has diabetes—and she’s angry at the people around her. Her mother is a complex character, clearly hurting, clearly grieving, and not really being there for Persephone.

And then Persephone discovers a body. It’s a woman, and she feels she knows her. Feels there’s a connection to her. She becomes obsessed with finding out who this woman is and she gains access to her Facebook account—and pretends to be her. She replies to messages as the dead woman and then gets close to the woman’s best friend, who’s also grieving, and was in love with her.

Normally, if I read about a character taking on a dead person’s identity, I wouldn’t feel sympathetic toward them. But with Persephone, you know she’s not doing it maliciously. She’s doing it to try and understand things better. She’s doing it as an outlet for her anger, as a coping mechanism. Her actions make sense.

While Persephone is struggling with identity—her own, her family’s, and that of the dead woman—we also see her struggle with diabetes. She feels she got this illness because of what she did that led to her dad’s death. She sees it as a punishment, and we see her spiral deeper and deeper, refusing to take care of herself.

Other storylines focus around bush fire in Australia that forces her and her family to temporarily leave their home, her cousin’s obsession with wanting a chronic illness of his own (likely due to the trauma he has from being abused by his step dad), Persephone’s ‘relationship’ with a boy and having sex for the first time, and her anger issues at school.

This book was emotionally heavy at times. But it is exactly the type of book I love.

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Review: BRUISED by Tanya Boteju

 

Bruised by Tanya Boteju
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

To Daya Wijesinghe, a bruise is a mixture of comfort and control. Since her parents died in an accident she survived, bruises have become a way to keep her pain on the surface of her skin so she doesn’t need to deal with the ache deep in her heart.

So when chance and circumstances bring her to a roller derby bout, Daya is hooked. Yes, the rules are confusing and the sport seems to require the kind of teamwork and human interaction Daya generally avoids. But the opportunities to bruise are countless, and Daya realizes that if she’s going to keep her emotional pain at bay, she’ll need all the opportunities she can get.

The deeper Daya immerses herself into the world of roller derby, though, the more she realizes it’s not the simple physical pain-fest she was hoping for. Her rough-and-tumble teammates and their fans push her limits in ways she never imagined, bringing  Daya to big truths about love, loss, strength, and healing.

— 

This is the first book I’ve read that acknowledges one of he ‘less common’ forms of self-harm: bruising. I’ve recently come to realise that I like YA books that are about pain and hurt and despair. And for that reason, I picked up this book as soon as I heard of it. Bonus: it’s about roller derby. I LOVE skating. Right away, I knew I’d love this book and I wasn’t wrong.

But I actually loved it even more than I expected to. We’ve got an f/f relationship (I loved Shanti as soon as I met her!) and nearly every character is queer and of colour.

Daya Wijesinghe is grieving her parents’ deaths after she was the sole survivor of a car accident. She blames herself, thinking she caused it by being ‘too soft’ (her parents were arguing about her losing a boxing match when the accident occurred). Thus we have 18 year old Daya who’s trying to prove she’s “hard” and “strong” and who despises anything she perceives as weakness. She won’t talk to her friends about her feelings, she won’t hug anyone, and she won’t connect to her uncle and aunt who she now lives with it. There is just so much anger inside Daya, and she is drawn to roller derby because it’s a contact sport where she can bruise herself more and more. She can slam into others. She can hurt and be hurt. She can feel pain.

And then there is Shanti and her sister Kat. Both are troubled girls, but they cope in different ways. Shanti is ‘soft’ and connected to her emotions. Kat is ‘hard’ and puts up walls around herself. Kat is the leader of the roller derby team that Daya auditions for, and there’s a weird attraction triangle and jealousy between the two sisters.

While nearly all the characters are queer, with the exception of the older lesbian couple (who are great!), none of them are really labelled as being LGBTQIA+. They just are.

This book is full of strong characters, and it’s a book that examines team sports, rivalry, pain, hurt, healing, self-hatred, self-harm, guilt, grief, and death. Highly recommended.

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Review: TOXIC by Natasha Devon

 

Toxic by Natasha Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Llewella has straight-A grades, a lead in the school play, a prefect badge, a successful blog and a comfortable life. Despite this, she feels like a brown, chubby square peg at a school full of thin, white girls. She's never had a best friend. Could the new student at sixth form - glamorous, streetwise Aretha - be the one? Llewella and Aretha get tight, quick. Before long, Llewella is following a diet Aretha has designed for her and has abandoned her own passions to dive headfirst into Aretha's world. She's determined to be the most loyal, greatest friend she can be, even when Aretha says and does things which make her feel the opposite of great. Even when the anxiety disorder she thought was cured starts to re-emerge. Isn't that how friendships work?

—

This was one of those books I just couldn’t stop reading. I devoured it in two days, even reading until 5am because I just had to finish it.

This book tells the story of Llewella and her new friend, Aretha. And right from the start, we can see that Aretha is a toxic, manipulative friend. I love stories that look at twisted relationships, and I think this is now one of my favourite books about manipulative and toxic female friendships (my other favourite is Genuine Fraud by E. Lockhart).

The friendship portrayed in Toxic is so one-sided, and so many times I just wanted to scream at Llewella to get away from Aretha.

Llewella has anxiety and panic attacks. Aretha pretends she’s good with these, but she’s not. She undermines Llewella’s mental health struggles constantly, and then she herself claims to have bipolar, referring to it as a ‘real’ disorder—oh and she isn’t diagnosed and won’t see a doctor. My jaw hit the floor here. It seems Aretha uses her self-diagnosis as a way to excuse what a horrible person she’s being. She emotionally abused Llewella constantly and it’s so obvious to readers. I was screaming inside as I read this. I don’t think I’ve ever hated a character as much as I hate Aretha. she calls Llewella fat and gives her a meal plan. Llewella spirals into eating disorder territory because of this, but it’s Aretha doing her a favour, ‘improving’ her. Aretha takes over the blog that Llewella started and then makes her start a new brand with her. Llewella’s money goes into it, of course. Aretha wants Llewella to be dependent on her, but then she abandons her at several points, one time in London zone 1, despite Aretha having panic attacks. 

Aretha makes it clear she thinks mental illness is a conspiracy, that it’s something that means the person isn’t strong or resilient (she also is fatphobic and claims a character with PCOS is plus-sized because of lack of discipline and illnesses can’t cause it—Llewella tackles her on this, but of course Aretha turns it around so Llewella is wrong). She uses Llewella’s anxiety against her, so when we do get Aretha saying she thinks she is bipolar, that was immensely interesting. Because, she could have bipolar disorder. But still that doesn’t excuse her treatment of her supposed best friend. And she’s a horrible person. At the start of the book, Llewella is happy, a straight A* student, has an important part in a play, and has a blog and other friends. Not too long after she’s friends with Aretha, Llewella is unhappy, her grades are dropping, she’s got an eating disorder, her panic attacks worsen, she’s in therapy, she gives up the play (as Aretha says she’s got to prioritise), loses her other friends, and she basically loses who she is.  The mental illness rep is phenomenal. Half the time, Aretha is suddenly annoyed with Llewella for no apparent reason, making Llewella’s anxiety much worse. And it amazed me how whenever Aretha was mean to Llewella and Llewella tackled her about it, Aretha turned it round. Seconds later, Llewella was justifying Aretha’s reaction and blaming herself. Classic gaslighting. This is the kind of relationship you see in abusive romantic relationships, and those are covered in books a lot. But this is the first time I’ve seen it done in friendship. And we need this book. 

I really liked how Llewella has a supportive network of women (and her grandfather) around her. These women give her the strength to end the brand with Aretha and gain back some of her happiness. 

This book also tackles racial issues. Both Aretha and Llewella are mixed race, and one example is Aretha is annoyed that Llewella gets a TV opportunity that she doesn’t. She blames it on Llewella being lighter skinned than she is, and tells Llewella to turn the opportunity. Even though it’s what Llewella really wants, and she gets the opportunity because of the blog that she started, two years before she even met Aretha. It appeared to me that Aretha felt entitled to getting the TV role and when Llewella got it instead, she blamed it on racial prejudice. And yes, there could be those reasons in it too, but for me (though I acknowledge I am a white reader), Llewella clearly deserved it. It was her blog. She had done the work. And Aretha clearly didn’t want Llewella to succeed. So while this book does shine a light on the important issue of racial discrimination, it largely does this while also emphasising the toxic character that Aretha was.  But there are Black characters, such as Steph, who also encourage readers to think about race and privilege, and this is done in an unproblematic way—though of course Aretha hates Steph, disagreeing with everything she says, until she can then say the same things to attack Llewella. 

Huge thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC. This is highly recommending reading and I think it should actually be compulsory reading for teenagers in schools.

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Review: NANNY DEAREST by Flora Collins

 

Nanny Dearest by Flora Collins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Firstly, thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for my review copy. Nanny Dearest is a complex examination of character—both of an unhinged woman and a woman who is looking for a connection.

When Sue meets the woman who was her nanny twenty years ago, she wants to reconnect with her as a way of becoming close to her family, as her parents are both dead. But the nanny, Annaliese, is a bit…odd. I mean, at the start, it’s just minor things. Things that can be explained away. But then we see her isolating Sue from her friends, becoming possessive and gaslighting her. Sue keeps coming across things that don’t make sense, yet Annaliese always comes up with a reason for these things. Alarm bells were ringing. It is an example of one adult grooming another. 

The relationship between the two women made me uncomfortable. It’s a really intense friendship, where Annaliese is making Sue dependent on her. Any time Sue tries to see other people, Annaliese puts a stop to it. Really uncomfortable to read. 

This book is told in two POVs, Sue’s in the present day and Annaliese in the past. And it’s these trips down memory lane that show Annaliese’s past behaviours around and toward Sue and her warped way of thinking that really ramp up the tension. Readers realise Annaliese isn’t telling the truth about what happened, yet adult Sue is now ensnared in her web of lies and desperate to trust her.

This felt like more of a slow-burning suspense novel than a psychological thriller. Indeed, at times, I found the pacing too slow and the middle section had me a little bored. But I was fascinated enough by Annaliese’s character to keep reading. There’s something addictive about this story.

It becomes clear that Annaliese is mentally unwell, and I have to say this representation is amazing. We learn the reasons behind her behaviour and how she justifies her actions. It’s an insight into a very warped mind.

Would recommend.

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Review: Chloe Cates is Missing by Mandy McHugh

 

Chloe Cates is Missing by Mandy McHugh
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

AThe disappearance of a young internet celebrity ignites a firestorm of speculation on social media, and to find her a detective will have to extinguish the blaze. 

Chloe Cates is missing. The 13-year-old star of the hit YouTube series, “CC and Me,” has disappeared, and nobody knows where she’s gone — least of all ruthless momager Jennifer Scarborough, who has spent much of her daughter’s young life crafting a child celebrity persona that is finally beginning to pay off. And in Chloe’s absence, the faux-fairytale world that supported that persona begins to fracture, revealing secrets capable of reducing the highly-dysfunctional Scarborough family to rubble. 

Anxious to find her daughter and preserve the life she’s worked so hard to build, Jennifer turns to social media for help, but the hearsay, false claims, and salacious suspicions only multiply. As the search becomes as sensational as Chloe’s series, Missing Persons detective Emilina Stone steps in, only to realize she has a connection to this case herself. Will she be able to stay objective and cut through the rumors to find the truth before it’s too late?

Told from multiple points of view including Jennifer, Emilina, and pages from Chloe’s lost diary, Chloe Cates Is Missing is a suspenseful novel of a child pushed to the brink, and of the troubled family that desperately needs her back.

—-

Chloe Cates is missing is a phenomenal debut. Seriously. It’s SO good.

I started it late evening yesterday and read until the early hours, and then picked it up again as soon as I could today. Within twenty-four hours of starting this book, I’d finished it. I simply couldn’t read it fast enough. Chloe Cates is Missing is a twisty, complicated story that spirals around Jennifer, the mother of Abigail who is more publicly known as Chloe. Jennifer began a ‘mommy blog’ when Abby was little, and ‘Chloe’ is its main character. While Jennifer’s son is allowed a normal life, Abby isn’t. She’s not allowed to go to school, have friends, or make any of her own choices. She has to constantly perform as Chloe, and we see the horrific things that this leads to. And the story begins when Jennifer finds that her precious daughter is missing…

Jennifer is such a fascinating character. She’s dark and twisty. She sees her daughter only in terms of what Chloe can provide her. She treats her like a doll, wanting to control every aspect of her life. And she’ll do anything to make sure she gets her own way. And she lies. She lies a lot, and I was never quite sure when she was telling the truth. This made the tension so, so high. I couldn’t stop reading. She’d engineered an entire fake life for her daughter for her followers to watch. Chloe’s ‘friends’ were photoshopped models. Any time Abby really did start making friends of her own, Jennifer put a stop to it. She wanted her daughter isolated and dependent, and Jackson, Jennifer’s husband and Chloe’s father just lets it happen.

Jennifer is also a murderer. Part of the narrative is from the perspective of Emilina, the former best friend of Jennifer and the now detective investigating Chloe’s disappearance. Emilina knows exactly what kind of person Jennifer is, as Jennifer forced her to cover up the murder when they were kids. 

And that’s not the only murder in the book. We’ve also got the murder of Missy, a girl the same age as Chloe and who looks pretty similar to her. And it soon becomes clear the murder of Missy and the disappearance of Chloe are intrinsically connected.

Chloe/Abby is a fascinating character. I really felt for her, could feel her desperation through her journal entries as she tried to fight her controlling mother. Indeed, the journal was quite horrifying to read when it became apparent just how far Jennifer would go to make sure her daughter was doing what she wanted. There was a fantastic twist about the boy whom Abby was secretly getting to know. And we really see the effect of all this emotional abuse on Abby and learn how her mother’s behaviour has shaped her. Nothing is as it seems!

There are so many twists in this book. The pacing is spot-on, and I simply had to read it as quickly as possible to find out who was the evil mastermind—because no matter how hard I tried to work it out, I just couldn’t. Every time I thought I had a handle on one of the suspects, a new curveball was thrown into the mix.

We’ve got a lot of first person narrators—Jennifer, Emilina, Abby, and Jackson (Jennifer’s husband)—but it didn’t feel like too many and I was able to separate the narratives quite easily.

All in all, this is a highly recommended read. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

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Review: THE ART OF NOT BREATHING by Sarah Alexander

 

The Art of Not Breathing by Sarah Alexander
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Since her twin brother, Eddie, drowned five years ago, sixteen-year-old Elsie Main has tried to remember what really happened that fateful day on the beach. One minute Eddie was there, and the next he was gone. Seventeen-year-old Tay McKenzie is a cute and mysterious boy that Elsie meets in her favorite boathouse hangout. When Tay introduces Elsie to the world of freediving, she vows to find the answers she seeks at the bottom of the sea.

----

This is one of the most hauntingly beautiful books I've ever read. It tells the story of Elsie, a teenage girl who has no friends, and how the disappearance and presumed death of her twin brother Eddie, five years ago, is still affecting her now. She's awkward and lonely, and she discovers the joys of diving--even though she's forbidden from swimming and going in the water, as Eddie disappeared when swimming.

Elsie holds a lot of guilt over Eddie's disappearance as she was supposed to have hold of his hand that day. Eddie has special needs (really well written), and she feels responsible. This leads to an almost self-destructive spiral as she becomes obsessed with diving and finding the place where she believes Eddie drowned. Her parents are too broken by Eddie's loss to notice how Elsie is struggling--her mother's an alcoholic and her dad leaves them during the story.

Elsie's older brother Dillon is the only one who notices--but not in a way that he is able to help Elise, because he is also struggling. And this is one of the best YA books I've read for eating disorder rep in teen boys. Restrictive and purging behaviours are how Dillon is coping with Eddie's disappearance--and the secrets he holds around this.

There's a really well written romance too, and although we get some 'insta love' moments between Elsie and Tay (the guy who teaches her to dive), such as where Elsie imagines herself with his last name very early on, there's also an awkwardness about it. It shows how desperate Elsie is for a connection to someone--we even see her starting to get close to another guy, Danny, in Tay's absence for the middle part of the book, and I really felt how she was drawn to others as a way to anchor herself. Indeed, it's like she's floating aimlessly, unsure of who she is when she can't define herself against others (such as Eddie or Tay). And that really makes her sound shallow, the way I've worded this, like she's not an individual--but she is. She just doesn't know who she is, and she's sure the only thing that can truly ground her is discovering what happened to Eddie.

Being in the water gives Elsie flashbacks of the accident, so we see how her romances with Tay and the closeness with Danny (another instructor) again bind her to Eddie. And, as the plot progresses, more and more secrets unfold. I was so surprised when Tay and Danny were revealed to be a part of this, and I really felt Elsie's own heartbreak at that discovery. There was a strong sense of betrayal, of hurt, especially as they'd just slept together.

The characters in this are so well written. I can't emphasise this enough, and I really

This, ultimately, is a book about and pain and hurt, about self-destruction and self-harm. But it's also about healing. It's sad and heartbreaking, but it's real. So real.


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