Nina Is Not Okay by Shappi Khorsandi

Nina is seventeen and likes to have a drink with her mates when she goes out.  Who doesn't?  Everyone drinks, don't they?  Except not everyone drinks quite as much as Nina, and then one night she comes home with her knickers in her hand after being booted out of a nightclub with no real recollection of what happened, but a sneaking suspicion that it was something not good.

I was really interested to read this book - I've seen Shappi Khorsandi do stand up before and she's bitingly funny, so I was keen to see what she'd be like as an author.  I wasn't disappointed.

Nina was a superb MC - she wasn't particularly pleasant, because people on a self-destructive spiral generally aren't.  She did have good aspects, though, like her love for her younger sister.

The story was a lot darker than I thought it would be - all the things Nina got up to and happened to her when she was drunk were pretty awful.  I kind of went away from the book thinking I'd never drink again.  It was also really emotional - it sucked me in, chewed me up and spat me back out again once I'd finished.

As well as tackling alcoholism, Nina Is Not Okay also tackles social media and living in a society where all your mistakes can be published online for everyone to see and where nothing really ever goes away. Another issue tackled is rape culture and at first I thought the author was trying to downplay the effects of rape culture, which would just have been weird, but then she comes down like a hammer on it at the end and I could see that all along she was talking about how rape culture is just so ingrained in society that we don't even acknowledge it half the time.

The only thing that bothered me about the whole story was Nina's mum's reaction to her addiction.  She knew that Nina was drinking too much (stealing booze, getting drunk in the daytime on her own) and had lived with an alcoholic for years, but still moved all the way to Germany and left Nina to fend for herself.  Obviously, this doesn't go well and it really confused me because yes, there are obviously parents who would do this but in all other respects Nina's mum was pretty engaged so it didn't really ring true.

In all other areas though, this was a stellar book and a really worthwhile read.

4.5 stars