Ready to discover another great book for this 2021? Take a look…
Rapids by Anna Bowles
Genre: Young Adult
Rating: 4/5
Publisher: ZunTold
Amazon, Hive
About The Book
Yan Harris is VERY EXCITED.
Well, of course she is. It’s summer, she’s got over her depression and she’s in London for a week with her BFF Chelsea. After seventeen years in a sleepy village where everybody just knows them as The Chinese One and The Brainy One… life is calling.
It’s a pretty cool prospect… if Chel can stop worrying about online discourse in the Nordhelm TV fandom long enough to enjoy it. Chelsea’s worried about Yan, too, to Yan’s annoyance.
Barely sleeping, barely eating, getting increasingly gobby, having an – ahem – close encounter in a toilet, giving a Tory MP a good kick in the shins, and running around kind of literally screaming…. well, it’s all just good summer fun, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?
My Thoughts
An eye-opening story about mental health, teenagers and life!
When I was young, the young adult books didn’t exist and the stories were too “perfect” to be able to relate to the main characters. I don’t think this is the case of “Rapids”; the story felt real, the characters with their ups and downs made me want to hug them and the core it’s powerful, be prepared for this quick read.
Yan will enchant you, with her humor and energy, but at the same time it will show you what it is living with a bipolar disorder, the ups and downs, the real dark side that no one talks about.
I loved this book; it’s not easy to find a book talking about mental health with humor and putting the reader in the main character’s skin, feeling what they feel and understand that bipolar disorder is not a joke, it’s a dangerous and difficult illness.
Yes, this is a young adult book, but I think it should be read by parents and adults too, it’s time that we try to understand our young ones, they are not perfect, neither are we.
Are you ready for the “Rapids”?
About The Author
Anna grew up in one of the parts of Cheltenham unlikely to feature on postcards. After an unorthodox adolescence that involved more scholarships and boarding-school encounters with princesses than are normally found outside the pages of novels, she took up following the Manic Street Preachers around the country for a hobby (in the Richey days, when they were good, mind) before heading to Oxford to study English, followed by Russian Studies at UCL.
She worked variously as a secretary, a magazine assistant, a live TV subtitler, a newspaper sub-editor, and a government media monitor before settling down to edit children’s and YA books at publishers such as Hachette and Egmont. In 2021 she published her first novel, Rapids, which is about a girl with bipolar disorder who has no intention of letting that – or anything else – slow her down. According to clients, Editor Anna is ‘antivirus software for your manuscript’.
Varietats 