Frothy and light. I listened to it in my car and still found myself wondering if there was some of speed setting on the narrator. Like I was listening to a 33 rpm set on 45. Now I feel old.

This book wasn’t tear jerking or heart melting and it won’t take me long to forget what happens in this book, but it’s a cute read. It’s a book about self discovery and growth, and it was nice. Not outstanding, but enjoyable.

This book was truly bad.
15 year old Frankie and Charlotte are bored of their boring lives. Their lives are nothing like the lives of people in YA novels. And TBH they think YA novels are unrealistic and do you know why: because YA novels have diversity. Frankie and Charlotte are surrounded but mainly white, hetero, able-bodied, neurotypical people (there was one lesbian side character who got a grand total of 3 sentences in the book). Therefore, YA novels are not realistic if they're diverse.

I honestly wish I was kidding. Annie Barrows was clearly trying to make fun of YA books... honey, if you don't like YA, why did you try and so badly fail to write a YA book? I digress. For the reasons above, one of the main characters - Charlotte decides to write a book that depicts the boringness of their lives entitled 'Nothing' and let me tell you, it's bad.

Charlotte and Frankie are the most one-sided characters I've ever read. Apparently they're different people... but they were literally indistinguishable within the book. The only difference is that one has acne and I literally don't know which one it was. The first 70% of the book is them walking around their hometown just being really mean about other people. One girl is a "hoe", another girl is "dumb". Mind you, there's not reasoning given as to support this. There's also another part where Charlotte meets up with a guy she's been chatting with online and is SO RELIEVED when he's not fat... well what the fuck. Like that's the worst thing you could be? By this point I was ready to donate my eyeballs so they could be put to better use. You know who Charlotte and Frankie remind me of - what I assume a 15 year old Lena Dunham was like aka hello white feminism, how do you do. Occasionally, Frankie/Charlotte try to make some good points that I think were meant to be feminist. The thing is... they only give a shit when it affects their white, straight, upper-middle class selves. I assume this is why they hate the idea of a YA book featuring an Iranian lesbian (literally something the girls make fun of).


There's so much more I could say but honestly I don't ever want to think about this book again. To conclude: there's nothing (see what I did there), that would make me recommend this to anyone.

It’s the perfect book for when you’re having a mentally draining day!
Ok bare with me... it’s not the best book I’ve ever read, defiantly not top 10. But it’s perfect in itself.

This is the type of book you read before you’re going to bed, to actually wind down, or around 3pm when you’ve mentally hit a wall. It’s nothing. Nothing extravagant happens, nothing crazy happens, it’s just so perfect because it captures what teenage life is actually like, and it’s the honest truth.

It’s a book version of watching a Disney movie after you’ve seen a scary/horror movie! Perfect for what it is.

This book is trash.

The whole premise of this book is that it’s a book about nothing, told from the perspective of two teenage girls who are chronicling how boring their lives are for a high school project. The book is supposed to be this meta self-aware commentary on YA novels and how their protagonists go through completely unrelatable story arcs and don’t reflect modern teenagers at all, but it ends up being pointless and totally offensive.

You know a book is going to be bad when it reveals itself as problematic in the first five minutes. Within the first three pages, Annie Barrows manages to disparage female queer POCs and the survivors of sexual abuse and incest, under the premise of “omg lol so meta”.

Get fucked.

You want to parody or satirise tropes in YA fiction? Try poking fun at unrealistic love triangles, “pretty girls who don’t know they’re pretty”, and insta-love. Don’t denigrate ethnic groups, people of diverse genders, sexes and sexualities, and sources of grief and trauma. And for the love of god, don’t casually throw the words “rape” and “incest” in there on the second page.

An easy-to-read novel about average teens living their average life.

Barrows somehow makes an awful lot of "nothing" into a captivating, relatable story. Char and Frankie are a dynamic duo. This is as close to realistic fiction as you're gonna get. Blended families, complicated friendships, and the everyday nonsense teenagers have to deal with is expertly laid out.