Book review: Am I normal yet?

NB: I feel as though I should begin this post by saying that I am an anxious person, a very anxious person, but I have never been diagnosed with generalised anxiety, nor do I suffer from bipolar disorder -- I definitely sympathise with the characters and what they are going through but I am definitely not going to pretend that I understand. Mental illness is a deeply personal experience. The last thing I want to do is offend or upset anyone with my review, which is going to be positive -- I promise. However, if there is anything said that doesn't sit right with anyone, please let me know. 

Goodreads synopsis

All Evie wants is to be normal. She’s almost off her meds and at a new college where no one knows her as the girl-who-went-crazy. She’s even going to parties and making friends. There’s only one thing left to tick off her list…

But relationships are messy – especially relationships with teenage guys. They can make any girl feel like they’re going mad. And if Evie can’t even tell her new friends Amber and Lottie the truth about herself, how will she cope when she falls in love?

Am I normal yet?

Author: Holly Bourne

Published: 2015

Wow! These where my initial thought on this amazing book, and for quite a long time it has been the only content of this review. This book is just incredible and its really hard to put into words why that is the case, not because its in any way surprising: this is my first encounter with Holly Bourne and the majority of the Goodreads reviews are very positive, but because this book is just so special, it is so important and its also so different. Since John Green's meteoric rise to fame, and the success of The Hunger Games, the YA gene seems to be filled with two types of books; dystopian and those about  teens with cancer or other life-long/ terminal illnesses and whilst cancer seems to be the illness that everyone's gravitating towards with literature, mental illness has begun to get a look in. There's Jess Valance's novel 'Birdy' about the pressures of being popular and what that can lead to (all I can say without giving spoilers), Jennifer Niven's 'All the bright places' and Rainbow Rowell's 'Fangirl', and whilst I enjoyed everyone single one of these and thought that 'All the bright places' in particular was very good at raising awareness of what it is like to live with a mental illness; in this case bipolar disorder, none of them did it quite as well as 'Am I normal yet?'

This book follows Evie's journey through her 16th year and what she hopes will be her new beginning at College. College can be a difficult and trying time for anyone; hormones are flying and new experiences are out there for the taking, when you have OCD its even harder. All Evie want's to do is be normal, she wants a boyfriend, she wants to go to parties and she wants to be rid of the nasty voices in her head and her dependence on medication. She tries really hard but unfortunately, even her best efforts sometimes weren't good enough. Everything about this novel was brutally honest, the characters, maybe apart from the sincerity and focus in the weekly 'Spinsters' meetings, were realistic and believable.  They were good friends, who had their perfectly normal spats and disagreements, and who were ultimately, and unfortunately, kept in the dark and grew frustrated about this but found a way to have their own personal happy endings.

What really struck me about this novel, apart from the characters, and the plot, which were fantastic, was the imaginative and raw writing style. Here might be a good time that the random capitalisation of certain words such as 'stigma' 'misinformation' and 'change the way we think' around 100 pages in, did make me a little annoyed. Holly Bourne is quite clearly an advocate for mental health and for changing the way we think and feel about mental health and that is amazing, this book, in my opinion is a great stepping stone towards it. However, I feel strongly that the same message would have been just as well portrayed and received had those words been left in lowercase. That being said this novel had a writing style, and way of portraying the internal struggle that Evie was dealing with, that goes above and beyond any other novel I've ever read before. It was interrupted and even, disjointed in parts. This didn't detract from the story or make for difficult reading but rather it offered an insight that, otherwise, would have been very had to put across. the bad thoughts, and their consequences, interrupted the smooth telling of this story just as they interrupted the everyday life of Evie.

This is a very important book, a very accessible book, and everyone needs to read it.

Rating 5/5