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A review by auroraevans
Nothing by Annie Barrows
1.0
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.
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.