When I saw that Annie Barrow had written a new YA book, I bought the Audible version immediately. I love The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which Annie helped write. And while I didn’t love The Truth According to Us, I had to know what Barrows would do in the YA realm.

The premise of this book is that nothing exciting ever happens in real life, like it does in YA fiction books. Charlotte is determined to prove this point by keeping a journal of her sophomore year of high school. It’s a pretty short book, and it mostly chronicles Charlotte’s friendship with Frankie. The book alternates between segments of Charlotte’s book, Nothing, and real life – told in 3rd person. It was a little hard to keep straight what was happening in real time and what Charlotte was writing. Perhaps different fonts are used in the print version?

Anyway, something does kind of happen in the book even though it’s called Nothing, but it is rather uneventful, which shouldn’t have been surprising to me, right? Given the premise of the book. I don’t know. I didn’t love this one. It may have been all the swearing. (There is a lot.) Or the drug use. (There is some.) I don’t know. I thought maybe for once a YA book might actually reflect what my teenage years were like, but even though these two girls were supposed to be super boring, they were still more rebellious than I was at 15.

It’s a cute friendship story with a road trip and first romance, but it wasn’t as great as I was hoping.

http://opinionatedbooklover.com/review-nothing-annie-barrows/