Review: AM I NORMAL YET? (The Spinster Club 1) by Holly Bourne

FACTS ABOUT THE BOOK

Title: AM I NORMAL YET? (Spinster Club 1)
Author: Holly Bourne
Publisher: Usborne Publishing
Price: 7,99€ (Amazon)

Pages: 433
Genre: Mental Illness (OCD-Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), Feminism
Year: 2015

BACK OF THE BOOK/ WHAT IS IT ABOUT?

NORMAL AT 16 =

College: check

Friends who won't dump you: check

Parties? Fun?: check

A boyfriend?: ...

All Evie wants is to be normal. And now that she's almost off her meds and at a new college where no one knows her as the-girl-who-went-nuts, there's only one thing left to tick off her list...

But relationships can mess with anyone's head - something Evie's new friends Amber and Lottie know only too well. The trouble is, if Evie won't tell them her secrets, how can they stop her making a huge mistake?

THOUGHTS ON THE BOOK

TRIGGER WARNING and thoughts on the OCD portrayal

I bought this book because the word "Feminism" catched my eye. For anyone who also thinks about buying this book because they read that it deals with Feminism - I think it's really important to know that the book does deal with Feminism but that its focus is heavily on living and dealing with a mental illness, namely with OCD - obsessive-compulsive disorder. 

If you have OCD-tendencies I'm not sure if this is a good book for you because it can be very triggering. There should definitely be a trigger warning on the back of the book or at the beginning of it. 

It's obviously very important to talk and read about mental illnesses to make people more aware of them and to give mentally ill people more  representation, but this book is definitely hard to read at times and crawls under your skin and also triggers OCD-thoughts that can be very hard to get rid of. If you already have some compulsive thoughts - like counting or touching some things and you believe that you'll get lucky if you do that a certain amount of times, or if you struggle with cleanness and thoughts on bacteria, this book can actually trigger you into thinking the way that Evie does and that can be very intruding and harmful for you.

I think it's important that a book like this exists that shows the reader what it's like to live with OCD by putting the reader inside the head of a character with OCD. But it's more important for the reader to stay healthy him/herself - so it's very important to shield yourself against possible OCD triggers.

The author wrote in her acknowledgement that she intended to make the reader feel uncomfortable by putting him/her in the head of Evie and by making the reader understand what it feels like to have these compulsive thoughts. And she really achieved that with me. I actually noted my feeling uncomfortable down as a bad thing but when I read that she had actually deliberately done that to give the reader this experience, I rethought that. This book did confront me with thoughts that I didn't like, that I wanted to distance myself from and that triggered some bad thoughts in me aswell, but at the end of the day I can take a step away from all of that and regard the book as an experience and a view into what it might be like to live with a mental illness, and I feel rather enriched by that because I am more aware of it now.

The Feminism In It

So there was definitely Feminism in this book, although the focus was clearly on Mental Illness.

I definitely enjoyed the feminist thoughts, conversations and discussions that the three girls had in their Spinster Club meetings and I think that it's great that this book gets so hyped in Germany right now because that means that many young people will read this book and will get confronted with these feminist thoughts and that's definitely a great thing.

It was refreshing to read about characters having such interesting conversations and tackling subjects like periods and the whole taboo around that or about them reclaiming the word "spinster". 

But I had a problem with the way that there were these feminist discussions in the book on the one hand, but then Evie's destructive thoughts about herself on the other hand. These two attitudes just did not go together at all. And the book also felt quite hypocritical to me that it did throw these feminist ideas in but let Evie not see how wrong she treated herself. I just had to distance myself a lot from Evie. On the one hand because her OCD thoughts just were very triggering for me and on the other hand because of her self-loathing thoughts that I as a Feminist just could not support AT ALL. 

Evie as a very problematic main character

Evie's self-worth seemed to be only determined upon her getting a boyfriend or at least a boy's attention. And that just goes 100% against my beliefs. I just wanted to shake her and tell her that she does not need a boy to make her "normal" - and I also really hated how fixated she was upon becoming "normal". The book did luckily also make that somewhat clear in the end but it wasn't enough for me. The book spent about 85% or even more of its pages with Evie being this destructive person to herself and it would have needed not only a few pages at the end to clarify not only to Evie but most importantly to the young readers that her self-loathing was so not okay and so wrong in so many ways.

When I started the book I actually wanted to stop reading it right away because the main character and the whole story felt way too young for me and way too stereotypical with Evie's desperate need to get herself a boyfriend. But although her two best friends Amber and Lottie also seemed to want boys' attention they dealt with it a lot better in my opinion. Although Amber has this unfortunate -no boy likes me and no one has kissed me yet so I'm worth nothing- attitude that frustrates me a lot because again - your self-worth is NOT determined by a boy's attention! But there was a fierceness inside her and I loved how invested she was in the Spinster Club.

This book is only the first out of the SPINSTER CLUB trilogy and the second book focuses on Amber's story and I must say that I'm quite torn whether I want to read the second book or whether I should just skip it and read Lottie's story instead. Because although Lottie was also involved with guys in this book, she really felt the most independent and the one who did not at all determine her self-worth upon any guy's attention. And I read the synopsis of the second book and it seems to be Amber desperately wanting to get a boyfriend - so the same problematic drama all over again and I don't know whether I'm in the mood for that.

But I must say that I did like Holly Bourne's writing and also all the artwork in the book and the British slang in it. And I also read somewhere that the second book of the series has a lot of Harry Potter references in it and I'm normally quite into that. (read my review on that exception here)

Evie had a very strange relationship with her parents in my opinion. I normally really like parents in teenage books because they are mostly quite cool and also often more relatable for me than the main character (I'm getting old..) but Evie's parents seemed very distanced from her and their bond felt quite unnerving and unhealthy. The scenes between Evie and her parents made me really uncomfortable.

CONCLUSION

I definitely have a lot of thoughts on this book and I also think that it's a book that provides its reader with a huge amount of food for thought and can be discussed with others because it's definitely not a light read that you finish and then forget about. It made me super upset and extremely annoyed because I was incredibly frustrated with the main character Evie most of the time. She was a very exhausting character to be in the head for an entire book and I just could not support anything that she was thinking. Her OCD thoughts triggered me a lot and were also very unnerving to be constantely confronted with. But as I said at the very beginning of my review - the author intended to make the reader uncomfortable to understand what it might be like in the head of a mentally ill person. And she definitely achieved that. But what I just could not stand at all were Evie's self-loathing thoughts. She just annoyed me so much with that because her reasoning was so wrong. So wrong. And I would have needed a much longer revelation at the end to tell the reader that what Evie thought about herself, how she belittled herself and determined her self-worth upon the attention of boys was just super wrong. I just feared that so many young girls who read this book would not understand that Evie's thoughts were so toxic because nobody really tells the reader this. That's also why I would not recommend this book to younger girls who are not too confident in themselves yet and who cannot see Evie's thoughts as extremely problematic but who will rather feel validated by her and that is very very very problematic and unhealthy.

I felt like the Feminism in this book was great and all but not really getting in the head of Evie since she acted the complete opposite of what Feminism means and when young girls read this I don't know what much the feminist aspects in it can really achieve. The feminism felt quite hollow at times because Evie did take part in those Spinster Club meetings where they preached Feminism but was always in that mindspace of obsessively seeking any boy's attention to feel more "normal" which goes completely against Feminism.

RATING

It's very hard for me to rate this book. The mental illness portrayal seems to be maybe too realistic because it is very triggering. But the author definitely confronts the reader a lot with the OCD of the main character and the book also forces the reader to deal with mental illness more and maybe also talk about it to others because the book puts the reader in this uncomfortable position where one just has to talk with others about it. And I found that aspect of the book to be very interesting and thought-provoking. 

On the other hand, I did like the Feminism in it and think that it's very important to put feminist thoughts in young literature to open the eyes of young girls (and boys). But as I said, you can't preach Feminism while having a main character who doesn't live Feminism at all but rather the opposite - depending herself completely on male approval, male attention and hating herself and putting herself down when she does not achieve that.

I would have wanted and needed a much bigger revelation and clarification at the end that put things in order and made clear how toxic Evie's behaviour and thoughts throughout the whole book have been.

So I award this book with 3 out of 5 stars.