I’ve had a little bit of a bad reading month. A lot has been going on and the book that i was reading at the time was taking me a while to get through, so that meant by the end of February all i wanted to do was curl up with a really good YA contemporary novel that would make me smile from ear to ear with how cutesy it is. So that’s exactly what i did.
Earlier this week was Mental Health Awareness Day. Mental health is something that i personally am very passionate about and am not afraid to talk about in the slightest. People need to be much more open about mental health and a little less afraid about what others think about the problems. It’s such a taboo topic in our society, lets be much more open and take mental health seriously! But this got me thinking about is mental health taken seriously in YA novels? I’m going to talk about my opinions in this post.
Title: Finding Audrey
Author: Sophie Kinsella
Genre: YA, Chick-Lit, Contemporary
Publisher: Corgi Childrens
Publication Date: 4th June 2015
Pages: 288
Summary: Audrey can’t leave the house. she can’t even take off her dark glasses inside the house.
Then her brother’s friend Linus stumbles into her life. With his friendly, orange-slice smile and his funny notes, he starts to entice Audrey out again – well, Starbucks is a start. And with Linus at her side, Audrey feels like she can do the things she’d thought were too scary. Suddenly, finding her way back to the real world seems achievable.
This was possibly the hardest Top 5 Wednesday post we had to make. It’s not easy thinking of characters you’d always defend when you generally read books that everyone loves. But alas we found some characters who we truly would defend to our dying days, ones that get so much hate we cannot help but stand up in front of a room full of people and protect our little angels. Okay that might be a little much, but we love them when no-one else will.
Title: We Were Liars
Author: E. Lockhart
Genre: YA, Contemporary, Adventure, Family, Mystery, Suspense.
Publisher: Hot Key BooksLittle Brown
Publication Date: 15th May 2014
Pages: 240
Summery : A beautiful and distinguished family.
A private island.
A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy.
A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive.
A revolution. An accident. A secret.
Lies upon lies.
True love.
The truth.
I first read The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky back in 2012 just before the movie was released. I read it with my then seventeen year old naïve mind. Recently I have been deciding what text I want to study for my dissertation (I was between Perks or The Catcher in the Rye) so I figured it was about time to reread Perks to refresh my memory and make a decision.
Title: The Duff
Author: Kody Keplinger
Genre: YA, Love, Contemporary
Publisher: Little Brown
Publication Date: September 7th 2010
Pages: 352
Summery : Seventeen-year-old Bianca Piper is cynical and loyal, and she doesn’t think she’s the prettiest of her friends by a long shot. She’s also way too smart to fall for the charms of man-slut and slimy school hottie Wesley Rush. In fact, Bianca hates him. And when he nicknames her “the Duff,” she throws her Coke in his face.
