Finding Audrey is Sophie Kinsella’s foray into writing for young adults. If you are used to her chick-lit books (Shopaholic and the like), Finding Audrey will be quite different.
What’s Finding Audrey about?
Audrey can’t leave the house. She can’t even take off her dark glasses inside the house.
Then her brother’s friend Linus stumbles into her life. With his friendly, orange-slice smile and his funny notes, he starts to entice Audrey out again – well, Starbucks is a start. And with Linus at her side, Audrey feels like she can do the things she’d thought were too scary. Suddenly, finding her way back to the real world seems achievable.
~ Synopsis from goodreads
My Review
In this book, Kinsella explores anxiety and mental health in a teen girl. After a severe bout of teasing, Audrey finds herself dealing with severe social anxiety. She can hardly bear to leave the house and struggles with people visiting home.
tl;dr: Finding Audrey was too flat and a bit too young adult for me. It tackles an important theme, but in too light-hearted a way (for my taste).
Here are some problems I had with it:
- The instalove – Audrey falls in love with Linus almost immediately. Now, I understand teenage girls can have impulsive crushes. But in this book, it didn’t really ring true. Also, for someone who has high anxiety, it felt like Linus very easily got her out of her comfort zone (where qualified therapist and loving family were struggling to do so).
- The kooky family – I liked the family, but still something about how they were all represented felt a bit off. They felt more like caricatures than actual people.
- The plot – This book was very light on the plot. I kept reading trying to get to the point of what happened to make Audrey so anxious. This incident is built up to be this huge issue that the school failed to take control of, yet we are never exposed to what it actually is.
Generally, this book felt really lazy and unfinished. While I generally liked the writing and overall depiction of mental illness, I think it was a little too light-hearted (even for a young adult audience).
There were some good bits though, even if they felt a bit lecture-y:
Life is all about climbing up, slipping down, and picking yourself up again. And it doesn’t matter if you slip down. As long as you’re kind of heading more or less upwards. That’s all you can hope for. More or less upward.
Summary
This book is very specifically oriented to teens. It doesn’t really translate to older people liking and enjoying it. I wish there was more. More development to the anxiety Audrey deals with, the story and the characters. However, despite its flaws, it does make for a lighthearted read with a message.
Finding Audrey should work for its target audience (teens). Unfortunately, for me, it was just about meh.
