Finding Audrey

Product Information

Witty dialogue, hilarious parents and the way their teen son deals with them, so realistic, yet hilarious. Overall, I'm very pleased I read this book because of the mental health rep, but I can't find any other notable elements of praise. And I can feel something new between us, something even more intimate than anything we've ever done. The only thing I didn't like was that we never quite found out what happened to Audrey to spark all of this. The family goes on strike and Mum hides her sandwich in the flower bed and next week we’re not gluten free anymore.

And I’m not even talking about the romance because although there may be a little romance, it’s not really romance-romance. She studied music at New College, Oxford, but after a year switched to Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

However, I think of it also as a book for anyone who has suffered from anxiety or bullying, played computer games, had a child who plays too many computer games . Very patient and likeable but I wish there were just something more about him that would make him more distinguish from all of love interests I was reading about in other books.

I've seen a lot of reviews suggest that Audrey recovers "too quickly" which I personally disagree with. Our anxieties will always be there, they are a part of life but as we recover, we learn how to deal with our anxieties more and I wish YA authors understood this better.

I liked the romance - I don't feel it is anything special, but I was happy to see a supportive love interest that helps the main character in their recovery, yet isn't attributed to as the sole reason they begin to get better. The story is about a girl named Audrey who is suffering from a mental illness due to some incident in her school. Audrey's family is hilarious and every character was so well-written and real; I adored them all even though everyone had their own quirks! The book says that a certain event at school triggered it, but it never told us what that event was. You’re not entering the international LOC competition, you’re not going to win the bloody six-million-dollar prize pot, and you’re not going to make your living from gaming!

I've heard people complain about this book saying anxiety can't be fixed by a relationship, and I have to agree. It's funny, sweet, heartwarming but also - I felt - an honest look at a teenage girl living with social anxiety.Even though I understand that this book is unrealistic and wrong, it really pains me that a lot of people younger than me will go into this book expecting representation and a form of hope and come out with 1) an unrealistic expectation that one person can cure you 2) an even more unrealistic expectation that recovery will be fast and seamless. I just hope that someone who's on medications while reading this book won't find the courage to do the same thing because Audrey did it. Instead we got one dimensional stereotyped characters, a manic pixie dream boy who changes the girl, jokes that missed their mark SO BAD that it would make you look away, prose that was blatantly written "for YA" (which never works), anxiety being "fixed" by bullshit external ways, an "incident" that was never explained (whether this was because Kinsella didn't actually know herself, was unclear), and a story with no core.