Book of the month - November 2016

The book that I've chosen to recommend this month is: Am I Normal Yet? by Holly Bourne. I bought and read this book a couple of years ago on holiday, and have been obsessed with it ever since. Here is the blurb before I get deeper into it!

"All Evie wants is to be normal. And now that she's almost off her meds and at a new college where no one knows her as the-girl-who-went-nuts, there's only one thing left to tick off her list...
But relationships can mess with anyone's head - something Evie's new friends Amber and Lottie know only too well. The trouble is, if Evie won't tell them her secrets, how can they stop her making a huge mistake?"

This book is a great eye opener about OCD: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which is a mental health condition where people have overwhelming urges, called compulsions, and obsessive thoughts. I researched into OCD a little, and found a good description of symptoms of OCD on the NHS website.

• An obsession is an unwanted and unpleasant thought, image or urge that repeatedly enters your mind, causing feelings of anxiety, disgust or unease. 
• A compulsion is a repetitive behaviour or mental act that you feel you need to carry out to try to temporarily relieve the unpleasant feelings brought on by the obsessive thought.

In the book, the main character, Evie, was diagnosed with OCD and is getting her medicine doses reduced. The book centres around how she deals with this, as well as how she feels going into college- and of course, how it feels to relapse and dealing with struggling to gain control.
I feel that this is a great book with so much emotion and understanding about mental health disorders, and it really helped me to understand how people feel dealing with these things every day. It really made me think about how silly it is that people say "OMG I'm so OCD!", as I can imagine this really upsetting people. It made me realise that some people don't understand how life changing these things can be- it is not something cool, it is something you would never wish on people!
I would definitely recommend this book as a great read for mature teenagers, as there are some parts which younger readers might find disturbing. 
-Elle xx

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