Review

15 year old Phoebe’s having a tough time. Her mum has gone off to doctor in an overseas war zone yet again, leaving her with her godmother Kate; her best friend Polly has fallen in love with an idiot called Tristan, and no longer has any time for her; and she’s supposed to be revising for her stupid GCSE exams.

To repay Kate for accidentally letting her designer cat out and ruining her plans for designer cat breeding, Phoebe starts volunteering at Kate’s cancer charity shop, where she meets a ragtag team of fellow volunteers, including the beautiful but mysterious Emma, and begins, against her wishes, to discover that there are some bright spots in life after all.

*

This book is so funny. It’s told via Phoebe’s diary entries, and she’s full of snark. And it has a cute romance and found family warmth, which counterbalance the snark. But it’s the snark that does it for me.

Here’s the opening:

Monday 1 January #happynewyeartome

Did you know that you can marry yourself? How strange/brilliant is that?

It’s called ‘sologamy’, and here’s why it’s such a good idea:

• The only person you need to actually, like, answer to or tolerate is you.
• No one is ever going to leave you, disappoint you or hurt you.
• We all die alone anyway.

I was captured from the start. I love a snarky narrator.

But of course the reason I picked up in the first place was the cover. How cute is this:

Answer: Ridiculously cute, obviously. Irresistible. Recommend.

Age rating: year 10 & up, see content info.

> Click here for content info — spoilers, enter at own risk!

Plenty of death, including death of Phoebe’s dad (backstory, before she was born), death of Emma’s brother (backstory, he had cancer, he was a teenager I think), and one of the volunteers has a stroke and then dies in hospital after the machines are turned off (in-narrative); depictions of significant grief; teen discussion of sex, including orgasms, the clitoris, vaginas, penises, etc., and (at one point) implied offstage oral sex; no sex is depicted; Phoebe doesn’t have sex or anything close to it, just a couple of pretty innocent kisses; frequent lighthearted swearing, including the f-word and s-word; Phoebe’s mum frequently leaves her to be a doctor in war zones which Phoebe resents and finds a bit of a rejection; one of Phoebe’s volunteer friends has Down syndrome; another volunteer, an elderly woman, becomes drunk, and they discover that her flat is in terrible condition, borderline hoarder-style (and they clean it up); feelings of rejection from best friend (resolved positively); depictions of GCSE exams & exam stress, with a minor character being put under considerable pressure from parents with threatening behaviour from the father towards the mother — all seems to end well for the minor character; Phoebe discovers that her mother had lied about not really knowing her father, and that they had loved each other and that he was Israeli — Phoebe becomes mildly interested in Judaism; a kitten nearly dies, but doesn’t (onstage); a kitten is neutered (offstage); Phoebe very slowly comes to realise that she is gay. Main romance is wlw, minor romances are mlw. Wow… a lot happened. It was mostly funny, I promise.

*

Brueggemann, W. (2020). Love is for losers. Macmillan Children’s Books.

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