Books shelved under “Friendship”

Some books are meant to be sipped and savoured over the course of many days. You have to engage with them gradually, wade into them and wait for their temperature to feel comfortable against your mind. Other books demand to be devoured in a single sitting. I’ve determined that, for me, Holly Bourne’s books are the latter. Once I start reading them, I can’t put them down. I started What’s a Girl Gotta Do? on…

I read young adult, or YA, for a lot of reasons. As I’ve said before, I read it to keep me young, or at least to keep me connected to the ideas and feelings of younger adults. It’s natural, as we grow older, to lose touch with those perspectives, especially as the world around us changes. Reading YA inoculates me, to some extent, against that. Moreover, YA novels often display so much courage. By…

With Radio Silence, Alice Oseman accomplishes the literary equivalent of knocking me over with a feather. I’d heard some good things about this book from people whose opinions I trust, yet still … I wasn’t expecting it to be this good. This captivating. Most importantly, this book has such strong portrayals of friendships, both platonic and romantic, and I love it so much.

Our protagonist is Frances Janvier. Head Girl at her school, on…

It has been nearly a year since I read Am I Normal Yet?, the first book in Holly Bourne’s Spinster Club trilogy. That was Evie’s story of her struggle with OCD and related issues. With some nice summer weather (finally), I decided it was time to tackle the sequel, wherein Amber spends a summer in America, working at a summer camp run by her mother and stepfather. I’m not as big a fan of…

Non Pratt wrote another novel!!!

It has a gimmick that throws me back to the ’90s, but it’s fully a novel of the 2010s, fuelled as it is by the spectator society of YouTube eyeballs and the intricate liminal spaces teenagers negotiate between their online and offline identities.

It also has an aromantic and asexual character. I’m probably going to talk more about this than about the main plot of the novel, because hey, you…

I want to teach high school because I want to stay young forever. Seriously. There is nothing like spending your day around teenagers, feeling their energy and their enthusiasm, being exposed to their perspectives in the world. At the moment my teaching career has shifted sideways, and I’m working with adults who need their high school diplomas (and that has its own rewards). Even then, I can still stay young by reading YA.

I started…

I love protagonists who screw up. Perfect protagonists are boring! In particular, I love protagonists who acknowledge their flaws and the fact they will make mistakes before they make them. I also love books that talk so explicitly about feminism and position their protagonists as feminists. Am I Normal Yet? is Holly Bourne’s sometimes sad, sometimes funny, always compassionate portrayal of a girl trying to live with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and Evie is a flawed…

It's 2016; can we stop pretending we don't judge books by their cover? Remix has amazing cover art—in particular, the way the back cover copy is arranged is a thing of beauty. Just look at it. If I hadn’t already wanted to read Remix after reading Non Pratt’s debut, Trouble, that back cover would change my mind.

I love that Remix is, at its core, about the best friendship between two girls. Yes, there…