Review of 'Holding up the Universe' by Jennifer Niven

After I fell in love with All The Bright Places earlier this year, I wanted to devour everything Jennifer Niven's ever written. Which, aside from some books aimed at a much younger audience than me, basically equates to just this book. I first bought this after seeing it recommended for one of the Zoella Autumn book clubs (what even happened to those?!), and it sat on my shelf unloved for a couple of years.

Libby Strout is known as 'America's fattest teen'. Dealing with her mum's death, Libby gained a lot of weight, forcing her to become housebound. Now however, she's able to go back to school after shedding some of it. She's filled with nerves about the prejudice surrounding her size that she knows other students will have, but she's determined.

Jack Masselin on the other hand looks like he has everything made for him: popular, good looking, and dating the hottest girl in the school. On the inside however, things are crumbling. Jack's suffering from a neurological condition that he's determined to keep a secret from everyone which causes him to be unable to recognise faces. He finds ways to remember who is who (their voice, or things like memorising hair colour etc), and pretty much everyone is duped. 

When one of the cruel tricks Jack's friends have been playing on Libby doesn't quite go to plan, Libby and Jack end up having to do counselling and volunteering together. The pair realise that not everything is the way it looks on the outside, and they might have more in common than they think.

I really enjoyed this book. It's possibly the first YA fiction I've read that has a female main character who is fat, and who isn't used as part of a joke in any way. She's not the best friend of someone with a love interest, or the younger sister, or the butt of the joke, or someone whose femininity has been stripped away. It's shocking and really sad that I can't think of a single book I read as an actual young adult that had a character like Libby in it, and I'm glad that this book is out there.

Niven also deals with mental health and neurological illness in a very profound way in the book. I think it's well with mentioning that she did a lot of research into Jack's illness, and had the book read through by someone who suffers with the same thing before it was published. The narrative looks at how both teens struggle with their mental health, and how this manifests itself in different ways, including panic attacks and anxiety. 

My one gripe is that it follows my least favourite trope of 'popular guy will turn his back on friends and popularity to date unpopular girl' that pervades so much YA fiction. It's such a lovely idea, but teens are selfish and scared of being rejected and outcast (which is totally okay - teenage years are rough), and it just really doesn't happen. Maybe I'm being cynical, but I really think there's an element of wishful thinking in this whole idea.

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Review of 'Wonder' by R. J. Palacio

In a world that seems to be more and more governed by bullying (whether that's nasty names at school, abuse on social media, or the increasing targeted harassment of minorities), it feels as though we can't make a big enough of a deal about the impact that your words and actions can have. Wonder is a YA novel with teen bullying at its heart, and it's a book that really makes you what kind of a person you were ~ or are ~ at school, and the effect that has on other people.

Wonder is a book about a ten year old boy with a facial disfigurement. He's been home-schooled all his life as his parents are fearful of how he'll feel if other people are nasty to him. However, when he reaches middle school age, they (somewhat reluctantly) agree to send him to a proper school. The headmaster grants him a chaperone, who August (the boy) soon finds out is being nasty about him behind his back. 

The book tells the story of what it's like to be a kid struggling with your own identity, as well as people's reactions to it. August is a boy with a lot of issues going on at home, and the book highlights how the bullying intersects with this and exacerbates everything. It looks at the benefits of real friendship, and showing August making friends for the first time in his life really is written very well.

My one main gripe with the book is that it weirdly sexualises one of the main characters who's a ten year old girl. It made me sit back with a bit of a 'yikes' and has totally decreased my star rating for the book as a whole. I think there were times at which the author was trying to make such complex characters, and include an edge of romance in this that they started to come across as teens rather than children. It would have been a five star read if not for this, but it just didn't sit right with me. 

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Review of 'Brighton Rock' by Graham Greene

I never thought I'd be saying I enjoyed a Graham Greene book. After being forced to read a truly bleak passage from one of his books during my a-level English studies I was convinced I'd never read anything from this dreary author again if I could help it.

And then I gave him another go, and it turns out I must have had to read a really rubbish part of his writing because I was hooked from the very first line of Brighton Rock. As it turns out, I'm a fan and I now want to read all his other works.

The book takes place in Brighton, but imagine less of the fun vibe, and more of a rainy murderous one. Charles 'Fred' Hale is a journalist come to Brighton to hand out newspaper cards as part of a competition. Having previously written an article that resulted in the leader of a local mob's death however, Hale begins to realise he's unsafe. 

On the other side of the tracks we have Pinkie, the new teenage leader of the gang. Desperate to prove that he's not just a kid, and to keep the mob in control, he becomes ever more dangerous as the book progresses.

And completing our circle of three, we have Ida Arnold, who met Fred on the day he was killed, and who's the only one determined to track down his killer, or even to find out what happened to him at all. 

This murder thriller had me gripped and felt like the ultimate Bugsy Malone style mob fiction. Greene managed to make the whole book so cleverly vivid that I feel like I can still imagine some of the scenes and the characters, without it having been too wordy. Set in the 1930s, I found this really hard to place time-wise as I was reading, as it almost seem to exist outside of time.

There were a couple of bits where the narrative slowed down a little too much for me, and I could never really connect with Hale, so I'm giving it 4 out of 5 stars.

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