Bibliofreakblog

Everything Sucks by Hannah Friedman

The grass isn’t greener on the otherside.  But that never stops people from hopping the fence.  Hannah Friedman grew up with a monkey for a sister.  Literally.  How cool is that?  Apparently not so cool when you are known as “monkey girl” for ever and ever and step on monkey shit and are outdone by a creature that eats spaghetti with her toes.

The kids in middle school with Hannah are relentless.  I know the feeling.  So Hannah gets a scholarship and goes to an elite prep school that looks like a castle (and I imagine has very green grass surrounding it).  And there, the kids are relentless.  Only in a different way.

So, despite being in circumstances that most of us can’t relate to, Everything Sucks is an immensely relatable book.  In fact, it brought back so many memories of my teenaged years that I started acting like a catty bitch.  That might also be because I was in a really foul mood that week, but I blame the book.

I kind of want to be BFFs with Hannah, and I kind of hate her, too.  She reminds me of this girl I went to school with, who super multi-talented and cool and I was never really good friends with her, but we were friends and I always kind of hated her.  She beat me in a poetry contest and I was pissed because she had so many other things she was good at, I didn’t want her to be good at the thing I was good at.  

So, here’s Hannah Friedman, younger than me by a couple of years, and with a published book.  Of course, she has the advantage by actually writing a book, so, you know, that helps.  

My point is, that I got all wrapped up in this book, which comes across as if you are just sitting around at a party and Hannah is drunkenly telling you her life story.  And at first you are being polite and listening but then you get really interested, and hope that she will stick around to hear your life story, because you are finding yourself nodding and going, yeah, I know what you mean, exactly.  

I totally meant that in a good way.

But then I started thinking about how really suckiness does not end when you become a grown-up.  Even though the subtitle of this book, “Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in the High School Quest for Cool” title is obviously specific to the book, the title could be applied to every stage in life.  And just when everything starts to work, you have some change and the balance is upset again.  In life as an adult, you still make mistakes and lose yourself and have to find yourself all over again.  Maybe you are not so obsessive any more and have better coping mechanisms, but to err is human, not just teenager.  

 
Buy Everything Sucks: Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in a High School Quest for Cool on Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(My reviews in blue)

Girl  by Blake Nelson
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Drama Queers by Frank Anthony Polito
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Prep: A Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel
The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han
Perfect from Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life by John Sellers
Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
I’m So Happy for You: A novel about best friends by Lucinda Rosenfeld
I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe
King of the Screwups by K. L. Going

Other works by Hanna Friedman:

none.