Before I begin this review I would just like to share a little bit of interesting information with you. Lisa Williamson’s previous novel The Art of Being Normal is one of my absolute favourite books that I could not stop reading and finished in one night. I would also like to add I am the proud owner of a signed copy of this book… in Norwegian. Lisa had posted on Twitter one night that she had a load of foreign language versions of her book and would send them out, postage paid, to anyone who wanted them. So I got one; as a talking point but mainly to satisfy my inner fangirl. If anyone reading this speaks Norwegian and is interested in borrowing ‘Kunstan a Vaere Normal’ let me know…
This in mind I was looking forward to moving on to the next one. I liked the cover, a similar vein to the previous one, and was on my holidays so it looked like the perfect combination.
We have all known a Mia in our lives. That one girl that is hot, knows it, is popular, gets drunk, relays stories of every conquest, is more interested in how she can use aforementioned hotness to her advantage than loyalty to her friends, manipulates and yet underneath it all is really none of those things and wishes she was something more. I could name at least three people I have met in my life that were like Mia, still know one of them and can happily report she isn’t like it anymore, and was friends with two of them. Mia is the middle of three daughters and could not be more different from her sisters Grace ad Audrey. Audrey is a swimmer and has potential to be of Olympic standard so a lot of her mother’s time is devoted to taking Audrey where she needs to be. Audrey is disciplined in the water but quite shy and timid out of it. Grace is the eldest and the one who has gone travelling to discover herself. However, Grace appears not all that perfect when she turns up on a surprise visit home pregnant at 19 to a boyfriend she hasn’t know all that long… This does not make Mia any happier however as she sees it as unfair that things would have been very different if that had been her announcement instead!
The story follows Mia and her general outlook on life which is very much all about her. It’s all about what fun she can have, it’s all about what nights out she can go on, it’s all about what she can get away with and it’s definitely not about what’s best for everyone else. Her parents are finally getting married and Mia can’t cope with the level of attention they are giving each other – nor is she happy about choosing a bridesmaid dress that more suits her pregnant sister than her own hot ass. Mia is a total diva and not an easy one to like for a lot of this book!
Throughout this story are various events where Mia gets herself into gradually more and more trouble that is escalating rapidly. She manages to convince her friend to go to an out of town nightclub that almost ends in Mia being taken home in a taxi by a much older guy that she has allowed to ply her with alcohol. She flirts outrageously with the boy her friend is obsessed with, simply because she can. She tries it on with her neighbour thinking he won’t be able to resist her, only it turns out he can. This ultimately culminates in events coming to a head at her parents’ wedding where Mia once again manages to ruin everything.
Mia is a middle child who has siblings either side of her who seem to have found their ‘thing’, yet Mia just doesn’t know what her thing is. She is told, but she doesn’t listen. My problem with her is that she is just so unlikeable at times, so rude to people, so utterly disloyal to her friends, that she doesn’t deserve any redemption. She messes things up for people so royally for her own selfishness that I didn’t want her to come out on top. She screws her friends and family over because she just can’t stop herself being a self centred brat! I really struggled with her. As much as the deep rooted issues come out and as much as Mia does redeem herself in some ways after Audrey runs away having had enough of Mia and Grace fighting, I just couldn’t forgive her myself. And that may be because I’ve known a few Mias! I’ve been the one who has been put in a difficult position by someone who has got themselves too drunk or had to be taken out of a sticky situation or has been abandoned by their friend because a better offer came along. I just didn’t want her to be forgiven or for her friends to come back to her. I was almost yelling at the book “Don’t speak to her again, she’ll only do it again to you!”
One particular scene in which Mia has convinced her friend Stella to go to a nightclub outside of town made for difficult reading. Mia is just shy of 17 but wants to go to this particular club which is far more adult than the one they usually go to. Something we can all relate to – I can remember the bright lights of a nightclub in Hull seeming to be so much more grown up than the local ‘club’ in town which was more of a social gathering of school friends than proper clubbing. When they get there she gets dancing, she spies some men who seem much older than them but are loaded and sets her sights on them buying her drinks for the night. Stella has already calculated the money they have will buy them a Smirnoff Ice between them and their taxi home (and who hasn’t done that!) but Mia is having none of it. She ends up absolutely bladdered and wakes up at home with absolutely no idea how she got there. When she finally speaks to Stella it turns out this guy was trying to take her home and was talking Stella down as a drunk teenager. Had it not been for Stella calling her sister, and speaking to her sister’s boyfriend, the outcome of that evening could have been spectacularly different. And this is the reality of the world we live in sadly. Girls want to be adult too soon and this is an all too familiar scene that some of us may well have experienced in some form. Williamson never glorifies Mia’s behaviour and rightly so.
I liked the way she was blunt with people at times and said the things that some of us may wish we had said at the time, but that didn’t make me like her anymore. I just wanted to shake her a bit and tell her to grow up and to make those changes to prove she was more than people believed she was. And maybe that’s what Williamson was going for here – to rile up her audience with this horrible girl! I really enjoyed this book don’t get me wrong, but I really did not like Mia very much and almost feel a bit cheated that at least one person didn’t give her what she deserved more than they actually did! She is so so heartless at times and it’s difficult to come back from that. Reading this as an adult has obviously given me a different slant and this book should therefore be a cautionary tale to those who are younger. Having known Mias and seeing potential Mias in my work I know my opinions are obviously soured somewhat. A good read nonetheless and I look forward to what Lisa Williamson does in the future.