Am I Normal Yet? (The Normal Series)
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Beschreibung
Beiträge
„Am I normal Yet?“ befasst sich mit einem nicht nur für Jugendliche wichtigem Thema: das Leben mit einer Zwangsstörung. Ich war anfangs etwas skeptisch, da ich ja bereits mit John Greens „Schlaft gut ihr fiesen Gedanken“, das sich ebenfalls mit OCD befasst, keine guten Erfahrungen gemacht habe, doch Holly Bourne ist deutlich tiefer in die Materie eingestiegen als Green. Evie versucht nach einem längeren Krankenhausaufenthalt ein normales Teenagerleben zu führen und an einer neuen Schule neu zu beginnen. Ihr Ziel ist es, ihre Medikamente völlig abzusetzen und nicht mehr als „die Verrückte“ erkannt zu werden. Wir als Leser begleiten sie auf ihrer Mission und vor allem nehmen wir auch an ihren Therapiesitzungen teil, denn im Gegensatz zu Aza aus Greens Geschichte, verhält sich Evie wenigstens zu Beginn einigermaßen kooperativ und kommt ihrem großen Wunsch immer ein Stückchen näher. Ebenfalls anders als bei Green finden sich in diesem Buch zwischen den Zeilen Hinweise auf Hilfestellungen für Betroffene. Man mag ein wenig an den erhobenen Zeigefinger denken an diesen Stellen, doch je weiter sich die Story entwickelt, umso klarer wird, dass es sehr wichtige Tipps sind, die die Autorin hier vermittelt. Zunächst konnte ich zu Evie keine rechte Verbindung finden, begann ihre Erzählung doch mehr oder weniger damit, einen Freund zu finden und dabei ziemlich schlechte Entscheidungen zu treffen, die so überzogen dargestellt wurden, dass sie immerhin amüsieren können. Doch Evie begibt sich nach und nach in eine Abwärtsspirale, was wir als Leser sehr schnell merken, wovor die Protagonistin jedoch die Augen verschließt. Sie fällt in alte Muster, ihr Zwang, Dinge wiederholt zu tun und ihre Hände blutig zu waschen, wächst und sie lässt niemanden an sich heran, will sie doch nur ein ganz normales Leben führen. Ich habe an dieser Stelle sehr mit der Figur gelitten und fühlte mich so hilflos – ähnlich wie sich ihre Familie ihr gegenüber fühlen musste. Holly Bourne ist es eindrücklich gelungen, die Verzweiflung aller Beteiligten darzustellen und die Tragik die entstehen kann, nimmt man in dieser Situation keine Hilfe von außen an. „Am I Normal Yet?“ ist ein gutes und wichtiges Buch insbesondere für heranwachsende Mädchen, die sich mit Evie vermutlich besser identifizieren können als ein Junge. Zwangsstörungen sind nach wie vor ein Tabuthema und solche Geschichten können Betroffenen helfen, sich vernünftig damit zu befassen und ggf. Hilfe zu suchen.
This was just beautiful. It made me cry several times and gave me a much better understanding for other people with mental illness. Seriously everyone should read this book!
Perfekt für Mädelsleserunden Warum habe ich mich für das Buch entschieden? Ich habe dieses Buch auf der Frankfurter Büchermesse als Rezensionsexemplar erhalten. Cover: Auf den ersten Blick fand ich das Cover etwas langweilig. Die weißen und gelben Elemente auf dem schwarzen Hintergrund sind zwar auffällig, aber man kann irgendwie nicht gleich erkennen, um welche Art von Buch es sich handelt. Inhalt: Evie kämpft tagtäglich darum normal zu sein. Sie leidet an einer medikamentös behandelten Zwangsstörung. Die Medikamente sind nun fast ganz abgesetzt, doch ihr Leben wird schwieriger, denn es kommen Jungs mit ins Spiel. Sie findet zwar in Lottie und Amber neue Freundinnen, doch soll sie ihnen von ihrer Krankheit erzählen? Handlung und Thematik: Es ist beeindruckend, wie Holly Bourne die Sorgen von Evie beschreibt. Ich konnte mich nie in Menschen mit so einem „Tick“ hineinversetzen, doch spätestens am Ende des Buches fing ich an mir Gedanken über mein Verhalten gegenüber betroffenen Personen zu überdenken. Das es vor allem in der Teenager-Zeit noch schwieriger ist, ist nachvollziehbar. Des Weiteren legte die Autorin wert darauf, auch dem Feminismus in ihrem Buch einen Platz zu gewähren. Auch wenn das Thema nur immer wieder leicht angeschnitten wird, ist es trotzdem gut dargestellt. Charaktere: Evie leidet während der Reduzierung ihrer Medikamente sehr unter ihrer Krankheit. Dass dann noch die üblichen Teenager-Sorgen dazu kommen, macht ihre Situation nicht leichter. Sie war mir dadurch gleich super sympathisch. Ihre Gedanken klingen authentisch und logisch. Amber und Lottie sind ebenso zwei sehr sympathische Mädels. In Jane erkenne ich eine meiner ehemaligen Freundinnen aus der Teenager-Zeit, sie konnte ich daher nicht ganz so gut leiden ;-) Schreibstil: Holly Bourne schafft es, einem das harte Leben von Zwangsstörungs-Patienten anschaulich und authentisch rüber zu bringen. Manchmal werden die Probleme witzig dargestellt, sind aber im Grunde erschreckend ernst. Der Schreibstil ist einfach und man konnte allem gut folgen. Die Lektüre war nicht anspruchsvoll, regte aber sehr zum Denken an. Persönliche Gesamtbewertung: Der erste Band über Lottie, Amber und Evie, die die Spinster Girls aus Protest zum Antifeminismus gegründet haben. Ob sie es im zweiten Band auch wieder schaffen, nicht nur über Jungs zu sprechen? Das Buch ist eine super Lektüre für Mädelsabende und Mädelslesegruppen! Auch die Zwangsstörungen werden erschreckend authentisch beschrieben. Tolles Buch.
Complete Review: http://isabellsbooks.blogspot.com/ Instagram: isleepnaked 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.
Muss ich meine Gedanken dazu erstmal sortieren? Unbedingt!
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AlleBeschreibung
Beiträge
„Am I normal Yet?“ befasst sich mit einem nicht nur für Jugendliche wichtigem Thema: das Leben mit einer Zwangsstörung. Ich war anfangs etwas skeptisch, da ich ja bereits mit John Greens „Schlaft gut ihr fiesen Gedanken“, das sich ebenfalls mit OCD befasst, keine guten Erfahrungen gemacht habe, doch Holly Bourne ist deutlich tiefer in die Materie eingestiegen als Green. Evie versucht nach einem längeren Krankenhausaufenthalt ein normales Teenagerleben zu führen und an einer neuen Schule neu zu beginnen. Ihr Ziel ist es, ihre Medikamente völlig abzusetzen und nicht mehr als „die Verrückte“ erkannt zu werden. Wir als Leser begleiten sie auf ihrer Mission und vor allem nehmen wir auch an ihren Therapiesitzungen teil, denn im Gegensatz zu Aza aus Greens Geschichte, verhält sich Evie wenigstens zu Beginn einigermaßen kooperativ und kommt ihrem großen Wunsch immer ein Stückchen näher. Ebenfalls anders als bei Green finden sich in diesem Buch zwischen den Zeilen Hinweise auf Hilfestellungen für Betroffene. Man mag ein wenig an den erhobenen Zeigefinger denken an diesen Stellen, doch je weiter sich die Story entwickelt, umso klarer wird, dass es sehr wichtige Tipps sind, die die Autorin hier vermittelt. Zunächst konnte ich zu Evie keine rechte Verbindung finden, begann ihre Erzählung doch mehr oder weniger damit, einen Freund zu finden und dabei ziemlich schlechte Entscheidungen zu treffen, die so überzogen dargestellt wurden, dass sie immerhin amüsieren können. Doch Evie begibt sich nach und nach in eine Abwärtsspirale, was wir als Leser sehr schnell merken, wovor die Protagonistin jedoch die Augen verschließt. Sie fällt in alte Muster, ihr Zwang, Dinge wiederholt zu tun und ihre Hände blutig zu waschen, wächst und sie lässt niemanden an sich heran, will sie doch nur ein ganz normales Leben führen. Ich habe an dieser Stelle sehr mit der Figur gelitten und fühlte mich so hilflos – ähnlich wie sich ihre Familie ihr gegenüber fühlen musste. Holly Bourne ist es eindrücklich gelungen, die Verzweiflung aller Beteiligten darzustellen und die Tragik die entstehen kann, nimmt man in dieser Situation keine Hilfe von außen an. „Am I Normal Yet?“ ist ein gutes und wichtiges Buch insbesondere für heranwachsende Mädchen, die sich mit Evie vermutlich besser identifizieren können als ein Junge. Zwangsstörungen sind nach wie vor ein Tabuthema und solche Geschichten können Betroffenen helfen, sich vernünftig damit zu befassen und ggf. Hilfe zu suchen.
This was just beautiful. It made me cry several times and gave me a much better understanding for other people with mental illness. Seriously everyone should read this book!
Perfekt für Mädelsleserunden Warum habe ich mich für das Buch entschieden? Ich habe dieses Buch auf der Frankfurter Büchermesse als Rezensionsexemplar erhalten. Cover: Auf den ersten Blick fand ich das Cover etwas langweilig. Die weißen und gelben Elemente auf dem schwarzen Hintergrund sind zwar auffällig, aber man kann irgendwie nicht gleich erkennen, um welche Art von Buch es sich handelt. Inhalt: Evie kämpft tagtäglich darum normal zu sein. Sie leidet an einer medikamentös behandelten Zwangsstörung. Die Medikamente sind nun fast ganz abgesetzt, doch ihr Leben wird schwieriger, denn es kommen Jungs mit ins Spiel. Sie findet zwar in Lottie und Amber neue Freundinnen, doch soll sie ihnen von ihrer Krankheit erzählen? Handlung und Thematik: Es ist beeindruckend, wie Holly Bourne die Sorgen von Evie beschreibt. Ich konnte mich nie in Menschen mit so einem „Tick“ hineinversetzen, doch spätestens am Ende des Buches fing ich an mir Gedanken über mein Verhalten gegenüber betroffenen Personen zu überdenken. Das es vor allem in der Teenager-Zeit noch schwieriger ist, ist nachvollziehbar. Des Weiteren legte die Autorin wert darauf, auch dem Feminismus in ihrem Buch einen Platz zu gewähren. Auch wenn das Thema nur immer wieder leicht angeschnitten wird, ist es trotzdem gut dargestellt. Charaktere: Evie leidet während der Reduzierung ihrer Medikamente sehr unter ihrer Krankheit. Dass dann noch die üblichen Teenager-Sorgen dazu kommen, macht ihre Situation nicht leichter. Sie war mir dadurch gleich super sympathisch. Ihre Gedanken klingen authentisch und logisch. Amber und Lottie sind ebenso zwei sehr sympathische Mädels. In Jane erkenne ich eine meiner ehemaligen Freundinnen aus der Teenager-Zeit, sie konnte ich daher nicht ganz so gut leiden ;-) Schreibstil: Holly Bourne schafft es, einem das harte Leben von Zwangsstörungs-Patienten anschaulich und authentisch rüber zu bringen. Manchmal werden die Probleme witzig dargestellt, sind aber im Grunde erschreckend ernst. Der Schreibstil ist einfach und man konnte allem gut folgen. Die Lektüre war nicht anspruchsvoll, regte aber sehr zum Denken an. Persönliche Gesamtbewertung: Der erste Band über Lottie, Amber und Evie, die die Spinster Girls aus Protest zum Antifeminismus gegründet haben. Ob sie es im zweiten Band auch wieder schaffen, nicht nur über Jungs zu sprechen? Das Buch ist eine super Lektüre für Mädelsabende und Mädelslesegruppen! Auch die Zwangsstörungen werden erschreckend authentisch beschrieben. Tolles Buch.
Complete Review: http://isabellsbooks.blogspot.com/ Instagram: isleepnaked 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.
Muss ich meine Gedanken dazu erstmal sortieren? Unbedingt!