Reviewing 'Completely Normal (and Other Lies)' – Young People’s Book Awards

Prompted by the release of the Children’s Book Council of Australia 2024 Book of the Year Awards Shortlist on the 19^th March, I decided a book review (see previous blog post) of an award winning book would be a great way to start thinking about book awards and book choices for young people. I was pleased to find that in the last few years, CBCA started the Sun Project (Children's Book Council of Australia, 2024b, p. 160) – their shadow judging initiative. I decided to review Completely Normal (and Other Lies) by Biffy James, as this book had been deemed an Honour Book, but had also won the Sun Project award for the Older Readers category (Children's Book Council of Australia, 2023). Not only had this book been chosen by the expert judges, but it had also been chosen by young people themselves.

Writing this book review forced me to critically analyse the book’s themes and core messages, as well as help me to determine why I actually liked the book. Understanding what makes a book enjoyable is part of helping advise others on their own reading choices. This is an important thing to be able to do when engaging in readers advisory with young adults. A study by Sande et al. (2022, p. 397) posits that giving teenagers personalised reading recommendations based on their interests helps to create positive attitudes towards reading. Therefore, being able to understand the deeper themes of a book may be helpful in readers advisory for teens.

This activity also made me think about how useful traditional book awards are for young people in selecting their reading materials. I often read the shortlisted CBCA titles since I assume that if they have been nominated for an award, that they will likely be enjoyable reads. But do young people think the same way? Are they even aware of the awards? That’s something I would like to investigate further. The CBCA judges books based on literary merit, cohesiveness, appeal to the intended demographic, quality and originality (Children's Book Council of Australia, 2024a). In a survey of teenagers and their reading choices, not one participant mentioned any of these as being factors in choosing books, instead citing reasons such as relaxation, learning, understanding others’ experiences and developing social capital (Wilkinson et al., 2020, p. 160). One might assume that these are things that are important to teenagers, as opposed to “book design, editing, production, printing and binding” (Children's Book Council of Australia, 2024a), which are also taken into consideration for determining the winning books and presumably have little bearing on young people choosing to read them.

While I’m not saying that book awards have no merit, I’m just not sure if they have much influence over what teenagers choose to read, other than the assumption that award winning books will likely be better stocked at both book stores and libraries, meaning the chance of stumbling across them is probably greater than with a non award winning title. In saying that, the chance of stumbling across a TikTok trending book are probably higher still…

 

References

Children's Book Council of Australia. (2023). Presenting the 2023 CBCA Book of the Year Award, Winner and Honour Books. Children's Book Council of Australia. https://cbca.org.au/winners-2023

Children's Book Council of Australia. (2024a). Book of the Year Awards policy entry information. Children's Book Council of Australia. https://www.cbca.org.au/entry-information

Children's Book Council of Australia. (2024b). Shadow judging Book of the Year awards. Children's Book Council of Australia. https://shadowjudging.cbca.org.au/

James, B. (2022). Completely normal (and other lies). Hardie Grant Children's Publishing.

Sande, L. v. d., Wildeman, I., Bus, A. G., & van Steensel, R. (2022). Personalized expert guidance of students' book choices in primary and secondary education. Reading psychology, 43(5-6), 380-404. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702711.2022.2113944

Wilkinson, K., Andries, V., Howarth, D., Bonsall, J., Sabeti, S., & McGeown, S. (2020). Reading during adolescence: why adolescents choose (or do not choose) books. Journal of adolescent & adult literacy, 64(2), 157-166. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1065

Book Review - 'Completely Normal (and Other Lies)'

After a series of ‘unconnected events’ that have had a pretty negative impact on her self esteem and sense of self worth, seventeen year old Stella Wilde begins blocking the world out and retreating into herself rather than dealing with her emotions. Her mum is a new therapy convert and encourages Stella to seek professional help, which leads Stella to meet Isaac Calder outside her new therapist’s office. With Isaac, Stella starts to come out of her shell, caught off guard by him and his little sister Paris who both take a genuine interest in her, which is something Stella hasn’t felt in a long time. As Stella and Isaac begin to get closer, their relationship moves away from a friendship and into something more. The problem is, Isaac is dating Stella’s perfect, kind, caring schoolmate Grace Reyes. When Isaac is unexpectedly killed in a car crash, Stella and Grace both have to navigate the world without him, somehow finding comfort and friendship in an unlikely situation. But how long can Stella’s secret stay hidden? What will happen when the truth comes out?

Initially, Completely Normal (and Other Lies) reads a bit like a YA romance with some mental health themes. It’s pretty clear that Stella is pretending not to be upset about recent events in her life, but that she is actually struggling and is attempting to fix the way she’s feeling by completely ignoring all of her problems. The novel is divided into two parts, the first being ‘Stella and Isaac’, the second being ‘Stella and Grace’. In Part One, we come to understand why Stella has been experiencing some anxiety and anger. While Stella feels she’s making great progress as a result of meeting Isaac and being able to finally open up and be herself around another person, she’s still experiencing a lot of confusion. Her relationship has some unhealthy aspects and as a result, while it makes her happy, she doesn’t actually seem to be growing as a person. Her attitudes towards others are skewed and judgemental. We often see her assigning values and judgements to her peers that aren’t likely to be accurate. Much of this is from the influence of her ‘friends’ who just aren’t a particularly nice bunch.

Part Two of the novel shows Stella dealing with Isaac’s death but in the aftermath, she actually starts finding healthier ways to cope. There’s a clear shift in her attitude both around herself, but also around others.

This award winning novel is a standout exploration of mental health, loss, grief, relationships (both platonic and romantic), emotional connections and finding happiness and acceptance from within. It also shows a lead female character’s outward anger and aggression, which isn’t something that we often see in novels. While the book obviously doesn’t condone this behaviour, it does show that it’s ok to have those feelings and that finding other ways to express anger that don’t involve aggression is possible.

Stella is an incredibly complex, messy and human character. Biffy James, the author, writes her so well that she’s somewhat abrasive at first in her harsh judgements of everyone else. She looks at others as if everything they do is an act and that no one does anything without thinking about how others will perceive it. We come to learn that this is due to Stella’s friends who have frightened her into being a completely different person than who she actually is for fear of rejection and humiliation. This, coupled with her feeling that her emotional responses are never ok regardless of what form they take is part of why she’s struggling so much mentally at the start of the book. It’s an insight into the lies we tell ourselves and others, the influence others can have on us and what it truly means to be ‘normal’.