Review

It’s the Christmas holidays and Natalie’s parents are separating. Well, actually, they’ve been separated for ten months but the traitors have pretended that everything’s normal, while Natalie finishes her final year of high school. They’re going to live in separate houses, so she’ll have to move and choose where she lives. Meanwhile, her two best friends, Zach and Lucy, have fallen in love with each other, altering the dynamic she’d relied on for years and which saved her from being a teenage shut-in.

Everything is changing… including Natalie. Emerging, thanks to prescription drugs, from an adolescent hell of debilitating acne, heavy painful periods, and other extreme puberty trials, she suddenly has the chance of her first romantic relationship. Secretly thrilled, but attempting to appear outwardly cool, Natalie stumbles through a hilariously awkward and highly relatable series of incidents in the summer holidays between high school and university.

*

I absolutely loved this book. Natalie’s voice — smart, snarky, hilarious — absolutely makes it. It’s incredibly relatable. She has no idea what she’s doing and is just making it up and frequently getting it wrong. Same! It’s been a long time since I was a teenager, but the hideous self-consciousness was instantly familiar. The wonderful mess of it all is somehow comforting.

Some quotes:

I was messy, leaking, uncontained. … My body was a shameful disaster. I was too embarrassed to go outside unless I absolutely had to. No, it was worse than that. I was too embarrassed to exist.

*

‘I’m sorry,’ Zach says.

‘Thanks,’ I say. I’d like to say I don’t want anyone’s sympathy, but I generally quite enjoy my friends feeling sorry for me, especially about this. Firstly, it means I actually have friends who care about me, which, when you know what it’s like not to have friends at all, means a lot. Secondly, ‘my parents are splitting up’ is a refreshingly normal and acceptable problem to have, and it’s far less embarrassing than an I-have-an-infected-pimple-that’s-so-huge-and-disfiguring-that-it-has-sent-me-into-a-spiral-of-depression-so-I-won’t-be-getting-out-of-bed-today kind of issue.

*

‘Say what you like about my mum, but at least I know she can’t keep a secret that big from me,’ Zach said, his mouth full of Tim Tam.

It’s true. Mariella tells you more than you ever want to know about anything. Over the years, she has told us about the man she lived with before meeting Sal (‘He left his toenail clippings in the sink, and if that’s not the sign of a sociopath, I don’t know what is’), the time she was caught shoplifting (‘I was twelve and my cousin said she’d distract the salesperson for me, but she didn’t, and that’s why we don’t go to their house at Easter to this day’) and the time she saw a ghost (‘An older woman with white hair, standing at the end of our bed, but I wasn’t scared because I knew her rage was towards men, so only Sal was in danger’).

*

You spend a lot of time in Natalie’s head, and it’s a really fun, if sometimes squirmy, place to be. I also love its low key Aussie-ness.

Highly recommended for year 10 & up. They will love it. And the audiobook is great.

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Kissing, mild groping, bed sharing (no actual sex); Natalie thinks that she wants to have sex and prepares for it, but doesn’t go through with it; discussion about how many previous sexual partners; swear words (some f-words, some s-words); a character is put under academic/career pressure by an overbearing mum; a character lies about disappointing exam results; alcohol consumption at party; drunkenness; brief references to smoking and vaping (I think that’s all…). Main & minor relationships are mlw.

*

Kenwood, N. (2023). It sounded better in my head. Text Publishing.

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