Happy Summer Everyone!
I hope that your summers have been going well. Mine has been so busy so far! I have spent the last several weeks in wedding mode. My best childhood friend was got married and moved to Missouri, all in the span of two weeks. Since we were both taking classes full time last semester, we had very little time to do any wedding prep, so we shoved it all into a very short period of time right before the wedding. Bad idea. I don’t recommend this. However, wedding brain is a real thing, and it makes you do weird things so we thought is was the best idea ever! *sarcasm*
Anyway….now that that is over *few*, I can finally get caught up on reviews and reading. Yay! I am pondering the thought of doing some video reviews of books. Let me know if you would be interested in mixing up the format some.
Recently, I have started branching farther out into the world of audiobooks. Usually, I only listen to audiobooks that I don’t really care about or are easy to pick back up if I fall asleep and lose my place. While this is still the case, I have found myself listening to audiobooks while I am doing stuff around the house or while I am hanging out on the couch. Finding Audrey was one of the books that I listened to on my recent audiobook spree. If you were apart of the bookish world when Finding Audrey first came out, you will know that the hype for this book was real. Sophie Kinsella is a well-known author in the bookish community, and the moment that the bookish world found out that she was writing a book that featured a main character with mental illness, it flipped. With good reason.
In many ways, Finding Audrey was incredibly refreshing because it gave us a main character who suffered from mental illness. I felt like I could relate to Audrey in many ways. Audrey goes to therapy and must take medication for her anxiety. She can’t make eye contact with people because the experience is just too overwhelming for her. As someone who suffers from anxiety, it was nice to read the sections where Audrey experienced what I call “squirrel brain”. These were the sections of the story where she would become overwhelmed by all the things that were happening around her or by the things that could go wrong. When anxious people, like myself or Audrey, make a mistake, we obsess over it. We analyze it. It paralyzes us. Normal people can move on with their lives. “The world is a very busy and varied place and most people have the attention span of a gnat. They’ve already forgotten what happened. They don’t think about it. There will have been five more sensations since your incident.” Anxiety keeps us thinking about all of the possibilities of the mistakes that could be made, and it was nice to see Audrey struggle with this in her head. I think that Kinsella did a good job of portraying a young person with a mental illness, while also making the book generally light-hearted.
However, my main problem with the novel comes close to its end. After Frank and Audrey go and meet Izzy and her parents, Audrey has a complete meltdown. She panics because she can’t get a hold of Linus, then she takes “a Clonazepam. Maybe two. Maybe three,” and then she walks to the park. Now, keep in mind, Audrey has been off her medication for weeks, and it is unclear how much medication she took (although it is clear that she took enough to make her forget that she walked to the park and fell asleep on a bench). This is all after/while she has a massive panic attack after seeing the person that sparked the downturn in her mental health in the first place. Still, after she is found, Audrey is in a surprisingly good mental state. She happens to lose her sunglasses on her walk to the park and suddenly, after needing them for months and after just having a massive panic attack, she doesn’t need them and doesn’t want them back. (Even though eye contact is one of her biggest fears/triggers) The world is brighter. The grass is greener. She can face people in Starbucks and not be afraid. I don’t think that this accurately reflects the way someone in Audrey’s shoes would have reacted. Everyone’s experience with mental illness is different, and I definitely don’t speak for the majority. I can only speak from my own experiences. Nevertheless, it didn’t seem likely to me that someone would be able to have an episode like the one that Audrey had and take the medication that she did, especially after not having done so in a while, and then suddenly wake up on a park bench having made leaps and bounds towards dealing with their mental illness. I understand that in later chapters it is mentioned that she is still recovering and that she is put on new medication, but that still doesn’t make up for this sudden shift in her mental state or character. I do appreciate this quote from the end of the book, which is supposed to explain what she has discovered over the course of the narrative, “I think what I’ve realized is, 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 upwards.” However, I feel like we were on a real journey with Audrey and that it was crushed in the last 50 pages. I also wish that we would have gotten a more concrete explanation for what happened to Audrey at school. I understand that she was bullied. I also understand that Audrey’s time at school was not what Kinsella wanted to focus on. Still, I wanted Audrey’s backstory to be less vague.
Other than the main problem with the novel that I mentioned above, I will admit that it was a fun read. The dynamic between Audrey and Frank’s parents was quite amusing. I especially loved Audrey’s mother and the way she obsessively read the Daily Mail and attempted to rid her household of computers and video games. Some people have said that the story makes it seem like Linus saved Audrey from her mental illness, but I don’t think that this was the case. I think that Linus was genuinely good for Audrey. He cared for her a great deal over the course of the book, even in the tiny ways, and made it a point to tell her that he thought meeting up with Izzy was wrong. I am glad that Audrey and Linus had one good fight in this novel. I will admit though that I did find the Starbucks game a little cringy, but I’m not one for cutesy romantic stuff.
Overall, while there were some aspects of Finding Audrey that I enjoyed, I didn’t love it as much as I wanted to.
Rating:
3 stars out of 5
80% out of 100%
-Jaime