bookwild:
Finding Audrey by Sophie Kinsella + one of my many...
Finding Audrey by Sophie Kinsella + one of my many favorite parts
“But I’m sick of this bloody jagged graph,” I said in frustration. “You know, two steps up, one step down. It’s so painful. It’s so slow.”
And Mum just looked at me as if she wanted to laugh or maybe cry, and she said, “But, Audrey, that’s what life is. We’re all on a jagged graph. I know I am. Up a bit, down a bit. That’s life.”
I’m not crying, YOU’RE crying.
Not since Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell, have I had such serious love for a book from an author I had never heard of before. If the type-setting above just isn’t enough for you to go ahead and look at this book, then let this recommendation be the thing that tips it over the edge.
Audrey suffers from social anxiety disorder and general anxiety disorder. In short, this means she can’t leave the house. Even while in the house, she is always wearing sunglasses. She can’t see other people outside of her family, she certainly can’t talk to them. Mobile phones and internet conversations are just seriously right out.
But this story isn’t just about Audrey. It’s also about Frank, her brother who loves playing computer games, their very slightly neurotic mother who’s taken off from work to look after her daughter, four year old Felix who is just about as cute as a button and way more crazy, and their dad who just kind of looks at the whole family with love while you’re sitting there wondering how he doesn’t go screaming off the deep end himself.
And there’s Linus. Originally Frank’s computer gaming friend, he becomes the first person outside of family who Audrey has reached out to since The Incident. (Those are my caps, aren’t I clever.) Although he seriously has no idea what to do with a person who lives with an anxiety disorder, he means well and seriously what teenager did know what to do with anxiety disorders? He’s entirely sweet and entirely human and that makes him just as loveable as the rest of them.
What makes this story so amazing is that it’s genuinely an ensemble novel. Every single person in this cast has something that they work through in the process of this novel, which makes it beautiful and interesting and totally a book that you can almost read in one sitting.
Except I couldn’t read it in one sitting because Audrey went off her meds cold turkey and that was just wayyy too much for me to deal with late at night. However, although I felt it kind of tended towards not quite believable in how easily that was dealt with (and yes, I do take all of the plot points into account while saying that, having both done that and watched someone else do that) the book had a very satisfying ending and I would suggest it to anyone with mental health issues or just someone who enjoys a nice snuggly book.
