Mental Health Book Review: Finding Audrey by Sophie Kinsella

Overall Rating:

Becky’s Rating:

Sydeny’s Rating:

The Mental Health Book Club Podcast enjoyed this book, Becky gave it 3* and Sydney gave it 4*.

This is a heart-warming novel aimed at young adults. It deals with the stigma and symptoms of mental illness in a teenage world. Audrey is a lovely character who will make you laugh and cry in her story of mental illness. Her new friend Linus stumbles into her life and together they try to solve her issues with romance and friendship. The book has an amazing way of showing the way in which mental health effects the wider family without victimising anyone. Audrey comes across as a fighter and a survivor, her character has a depth and intelligence that can be lost when writing a character who is dealing with mental illness. a

This book is a bright and inspiring story which should be in every secondary school library. It is a great way for young adults to gain an understanding of what it is like to have a mental illness and that people are not alone.

Find our full review at www.mentalhealthbookclub.com, on iTunes or where ever you get your podcasts.

Episode 34 – Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

Find out more at www.mentalhealthbookclub.com

Trigger warning: this podcast discusses suicide, sexual assault, rape, stalking, bullying and depression.

Get our next book here

If you feel suicidal call 999 immediately.

Theatre group: Peer Productions – Losing it

If you need to talk you can contact:

Samaritans on:

Mental Health Resources:

Rethink Mental Illness

Mind The Mental Health Charity

  • Infoline: 0300 123 3393 (Our lines are open 9am to 6pm, Monday to Friday (except for bank holidays)
  • Text: 86463
  • http://bit.ly/2p6rntK

Social Media

Twitter:
Podcast: @MHBC_Podcast
 
Facebook

Episode 32 – Sugar by Deidre Riordan Hall

Find out more at www.mentalhealthbookclub.com

Trigger warning: this podcast discusses binge eating emotional and physical abuse, tragic death, sexual assault and attempted rape.

Get our next book here

If you feel suicidal call 999 immediately.

If you need to talk you can contact:

Samaritans on:

Mental Health Resources:

Rethink Mental Illness

Mind The Mental Health Charity

  • Infoline: 0300 123 3393 (Our lines are open 9am to 6pm, Monday to Friday (except for bank holidays)
  • Text: 86463
  • http://bit.ly/2p6rntK

Social Media

Twitter:
Podcast: @MHBC_Podcast
 
Facebook

Episode 30.1 – Finding Audrey the missing 30 minutes

There seems to have been some technical glitch that has meant some of you have only had the first 30 minutes of the episode on Finding Audrey. If that has happened, we are so sorry and this is the last section of Episode 30.

If you have been able to download Episode 30 and it is 1hr 10 minutes long then you have already had this part of the podcast.

 

Episode 30 – Finding Audrey by Sophie Kinsella

Find out more at www.mentalhealthbookclub.com

Trigger warning: this podcast discusses Social Anxiety Disorder

Get the book here

If you feel suicidal call 999 immediately.

If you need to talk you can contact:

Samaritans on:

Mental Health Resources:

Rethink Mental Illness

Mind The Mental Health Charity

  • Infoline: 0300 123 3393 (Our lines are open 9am to 6pm, Monday to Friday (except for bank holidays)
  • Text: 86463
  • http://bit.ly/2p6rntK

Book 14 – Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

TV Series:

You can’t stop the future.
You can’t rewind the past.
The only way to learn the secret . . . is to press play.

Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers several cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker–his classmate and crush–who committed suicide two weeks earlier. Hannah’s voice tells him that there are thirteen reasons why she decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, he’ll find out why.

Clay spends the night crisscrossing his town with Hannah as his guide. He becomes a firsthand witness to Hannah’s pain, and as he follows Hannah’s recorded words throughout his town, what he discovers changes his life forever.

Book 13 – Sugar by Deirdre Riordan Hall

I’m the fat Puerto Rican–Polish girl who doesn’t feel like she belongs in her skin, or anywhere else for that matter. I’ve always been too much and yet not enough.

Sugar Legowski-Gracia wasn’t always fat, but fat is what she is now at age seventeen. Not as fat as her mama, who is so big she hasn’t gotten out of bed in months. Not as heavy as her brother, Skunk, who has more meanness in him than fat, which is saying something. But she’s large enough to be the object of ridicule wherever she is: at the grocery store, walking down the street, at school. Sugar’s life is dictated by taking care of Mama in their run-down home—cooking, shopping, and, well, eating. A lot of eating, which Sugar hates as much as she loves.

When Sugar meets Even (not Evan—his nearly illiterate father misspelled his name on the birth certificate), she has the new experience of someone seeing her and not her body. As their unlikely friendship builds, Sugar allows herself to think about the future for the first time, a future not weighed down by her body or her mother.

Soon Sugar will have to decide whether to become the girl that Even helps her see within herself or to sink into the darkness of the skin-deep role her family and her life have created for her.

 

Book 12 – Finding Audrey by Sophie Kinsella

From the bestselling author of the Shopaholic series comes a story of humour, heart and heartache. Finding Audrey is Sophie Kinsella’s first novel for teens, sure to appeal to her legions of adult and young adult fans all over the world.

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.

Be prepared to laugh, dream and hope with Audrey as she learns that even when you feel like you have lost yourself, love can still find you . . .

I think it is a good portrayal of mental health issues but there are certain things that are a bit strange – her almost immediate love for Linus and her mother’s behaviour general but I think that is meant to be humorous