“Everyone’s on the cliff edge of normal. Everyone finds life an utter nightmare sometimes, and there’s no ‘normal’ way of dealing with it… There is no normal, Evelyn.” – 4.5/5 stars!

Attention! This book contains: great friendships, OCD medication, movies, cleaning supplies, being normal, psychiatrist appointments, terrible love interests, washed hands and young spinsters.

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?

I feel like I’m going through a reading phase where I don’t pick up YA coming of age stories anymore, but I still had this book on my shelf for a long time and I decided to read it before I give it away. So I read it, and surprisingly – I think this is a hidden gem!

Let me start by saying this is not a book centered on romance. I mean, this still has love interests and all, but it’s truly a coming of age story. It follows this girl named Evie who suffers from OCD and is on her path to become “normal” – or her definition of normal, that is.

It was an extremely funny, wholesome and simultaneously sad book. I loved the humor, the characters, the story and how honest it felt. Evie was a likable character and I can only imagine what it is like to be in her shoes. She was always hopeful she would get better and her medication dosage would diminish whenever she visited her psychiatrist, but sometimes it’s hard to get a hold on what we can’t control. It made me think about what people with OCD go through and how it affects their lives.

The other characters were good, but I had a bit of an issue with her parents and psychiatrist. The parents were really insensitive and the way they kept separating Evie from her sister so she wouldn’t “influence her” was absolutely terrible and made me feel icky. Also her psychiatrist had a really questionable way of thinking by forcing her to eat an expired sandwich. That felt super wrong.

Her friends were cool, but I personally didn’t love Amber. She just seemed a little too passive aggressive and manipulative for my taste, but she wasn’t the worst character in this by far. I really liked how they created their own spinster club and how they reinvented what the word meant! I thought that was really cute.

Also, like I said, this is not exactly a romance book but there are three – oh yes, you read that right – three love interests! Unfortunately the story takes a turn and it doesn’t end up like I think most readers would. The love interests were very interesting and different from what we normally see in YA romances, but I liked the role of each one of them and how they contributed to her growth. Again, this is a coming of age story, not a romance.

In the end, I liked this book a lot. And I kind of want to read more about the other girls of the Spinster Club! Maybe I should continue this series? 

Who knew I would enjoy a YA coming of age story again?