Alice Oseman is beloved in the YA community, and I was a massive fan of the Heartstopper TV series, so thought I would like this too - a cute coming-of-age story but not groundbreaking.

I found this moved in a slow, and couldn’t really connect with the characters. I got about 25% and was unable to finish.

This book is a tribute to fandom, and chosen family. It has Oseman's flagship character development, which makes for a cute contemporary that everyone can fall in love with. Alice is a strong UKYA voice, and I love her ability to intertwine mental health in each story she writes.

I found this book to be very slow, I just wasn’t interested in the characters and couldn’t invest in the story. I didn’t finish it.

The last of the YA Book Prize shortlisted books in this wrap-up, I didn’t love I Was Born For This as much as I thought I was going to because the story took so long to get going. From the 50% mark I flew through it and loved following Jimmy and Angel, bouncing backwards and forwards between their perspectives, and I thought that the way Alice Oseman explored fandom and the idolatry nature of teenagers was very interesting, but it just didn’t quite recover the momentum that was missing throughout the first half.

This book is so addictive!
Started out slower and I thought it seemed like it would be the famous-meets-normal-person trope. Which don’t get me wrong I absolutely love! (Camp rock amiright?) but it’s so much more than that!
I Was Born For This really focuses in on the power of friendship and finding your tribe within things like fandoms, and also within the band itself.

Diversity is excellent, woven so well into the story it doesn’t seem out of place and isn’t over stepping the mark as it’s not own voices. Extreamly well researched (Alice’s vid)
I love how realistic they felt for 18 year olds. Not the stereotypical I’m a teen but have everything firgured out vibe a lot of YA seems to have.
The book tackle anxiety in such a refreshing way and how it can effect people in different ways.

My only really negative was with the ending, I feel as though you need to suspend your disbelief slightly as it gets a little bit out there. Overall though it did tie up the story well and gave a more realistic ending for each of the characters.

Alice Oseman once again proves herself to be one of the finest new authors of British young adult fiction in this powerful story of friendship and fandom. With an impressively diverse cast, complex themes and beautiful prose, I Was Born for This is one of those books that you lie awake thinking about for weeks after you’ve finished it and end up recommending to anyone who’ll listen.

Told through two interwoven perspectives, I Was Born for This follows Angel Rahimi, a hijabi fangirl whose life revolves around internationally famous boyband The Ark and the band’s frontman, Jimmy Kaga-Ricci, a trans teen struggling with anxiety while getting used to his life in the spotlight. When Angel and Jimmy’s worlds collide at a fan event both are forced to examine their perceptions of themselves, their friends and each other.

Anyone with an interest or involvement in fandom will love Oseman’s nuanced take on fandom culture. I Was Born for This reminded me of Fangirl and How to Repair a Mechanical Heart (two fannish books I love and absolutely recommend), but it also felt like a completely fresh, up-to-date perspective of fandom. Through Angel and her friends, Oseman examines the highs and lows of fan culture without ever belittling her fannish characters for their obsession with a boyband. Through Jimmy, she explores the psychological consequences of fame and the vulnerability of young celebrities spending their formative years in the spotlight.

Throughout I Was Born for This, Oseman also deftly explores complex ideas, such as the public derision of female-led fandoms and the similarities between fandom culture and organised religion, but while her ideas are complex, her writing is easily accessible. Oseman shows that she really gets her audience; Jimmy and Angel’s hopes and fears are so relatable, and they think and speak like real British teenagers of today.

Honestly, I can’t recommend Oseman’s books enough. If you’re a fan of thoughtful, diverse contemporary realistic novels, I highly recommend picking up a copy of I Was Born for This.

Many thanks to HarperCollins for providing a copy of I Was Born for This. The opinions expressed in this review are my own.

Publisher: HarperCollins Children’s Books
Rating: 5 stars | ★★★★★
Review cross-posted to Paperback'd Reviews, Goodreads & Amazon

I read this in one day - can't remember the last time that happened! Very insightful on fandom and fame and super entertaining, with a diverse and very sympathetic cast of characters. A really excellent YA novel

I will endlessly love Alice Oseman. Everything she puts out is so spot on in the way it dissects an aspect of teen/young adult life and I loved her step into fandom. Beautiful, inclusive, diverse writing - looking forward to everything she does over the years.

This has to be one of the most inclusive books I've ever read. It's matter-of-fact in tone, accepting without being naive, and rather brilliant in a variety of ways. It's like the antithesis of all those boring hetero-normal romance books that make up the majority of the YA shelves. It's about obsession and life and friendship and growing up and dreams and reality. It's really quite masterful, and I'm jealous of Oseman for creating it.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

IWBFT switches between the POV of a trans member of a successful teen boy band and one of their fans.

The band are struggling with the usual pressures of being famous and not having any privacy or life outside the band. And the fan "Angel" is coming to grips with the reality behind the fantasy of celebrities as well as meeting a long-term internet friend for the first time and navigating that friendship in real life.

In general this book had an overall feel good easy read vibe to it and I think it would be very popular in my school library.

I Was Born for This is a book of celebration, of fandoms, of individuality and of our friendships - our ability to make human connections in the most unexpected of ways.


What made this book even more special is the casual use of diversity representation. I Was Born for This is told in two perspectives: Jimmy Kaga-Ricci and Angel/Fareshteh Rahimi. Jimmy is an internationally worshiped musician, who just also happens to be Trans, Gay and born of Italian and Indian parents. Angel is a fangirl of Jimmy's band, and just so happens to be Muslim.


Not only is there ethnic, sexuality and gender representation, but Oseman somehow writes anxiety in a way that bought this book way closer to home I had expected it to. I understood a lot of Angel's thought paths in her social interactions and Jimmy's constant struggle with his overthinking.


Something else I think that this does well, is proving our need, as humans, to build relationships and connections at the age of Angel and Jimmy. How Angel's connection to fandoms can be cruicial to teens, they are what that person needs in order to shape their identidity and ideas of the self.


It's funny. Okay, 'funny' isn't the right word here, but this book brought me back to some events that have occurred in the past year or so. Especially surrounding the deaths of rock singers Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington. To anyone out there, who isn't aware, Chester Bennington and Linkin Park are my all time favourite band. They are heavily involved in some of my earliest memories and were the first band I ever saw live at 9 years old!

And I just want to draw this back to reminding everyone that we don't know what's happening behind the mask of someone in the public eye, nor the people we come across in the street, or even our closest friends and family members. What we see is one level, a trampoline that we can only push to jump on, before being bounced back to the surface. Be kind!

I don’t want to be spoiler-y, as I have friends who want to read this book! I was Born For This is a book about anyone who loves a band’s dream of maybe getting a bit stuck with them for a bit and Alice Oseman does this so brilliantly in her new book.

As someone who has two great friends from online, it was nice to see a story about how friendships are formed and created in 2018. The characters are refreshing and really easy to connect to for me in this book - I know how I felt about All Time Low in my youth to get somewhat how Angel gets The Ark and it makes a great read. The diversity of the characters too is also fantastic.

The dual perspective of this novel (something I absolutely love in fiction), from Angel’s and Jimmy’s perspective is really done incredibly well. It’s nice to read a contemporary that isn’t about falling in love, but two just people crossing paths and the writer creates a story that builds around them and it’s done so well in this book.

Love the uniqueness, love the characters, the plot is a little unbelievable sometimes, but it’s fiction, I’ll let it go. This is a fantastic book.

(I received an ARC from Netgalley for a honest review).

Fantastic read. The book featured on my blog as part of the I Was Born For This YA Playlist blog tour (see link below).

Alice Oseman perfectly crafts her teenage characters to a level of reliability that they feel like they could just jump out of the book and exist in real life. It was fascinating to hear about fandom from both the fan and the creators perspective, and the two perspectives worked really well to show the divide and miscommunication between the two.

Slowly building, Intense and emotionally dramatic, IWBFT captures the same tone as Alice Oseman's previous two books, and manages to get you right in the feels by the very end.

This was such a cute and uplifting story, exploring fan culture, friendships, and how fame affects young people. It's well-written and explores human connections with integrity, curiosity and discernment. There's very little romance in the story, but there's so much platonic love between characters. Angel, Jimmy, and Rowan say 'I love you' often, and it's doesn't hold any less power or meaning, for being platonic rather than romantic. IWBFT is also incredibly diverse in a way that feels realistic to real life. Of course, I can't speak for the transgender or Muslim rep, but it seems, from Alice Oseman's acknowledgements, that she employed a lot of sensitivity readers to read this book. Giving accurate, detailed, and sensitive rep seems important to her, and as a white author she seems to understand how vital it is for marginalised readers not just to be represented, but to be represented well.

This book fascinated me. Like actually. I was so invested and so interested, perhaps because parts of it felt really relatable and perhaps because it felt really relevant and was a really interesting take on a really interesting story. To be honest, anything to do with fandom always peaks my interest because it’s something that, to a degree, I am familiar with.


I Was Born For This deals with fandom but interestingly it looks at the whole thing from both sides, that of the fan and of the celebrity, which I liked because AT THE RISK OF REPEATING MYSELF, it’s really really interesting. Sometimes I think it can be easy to fall into a trap wherein you see celebrities as sort of two-dimensional; this book calls you out on that, and I think, in this age of the internet, of accessibility, that's really important. It also deals with internet friendships, it deals with finding your place and feeling like you belong, it deals with mental health and on top of all of that it’s beautifully wonderfully diverse and not in that sometimes obnoxious ticking boxes way.

It is, quite frankly, a gem of a book and I offer Alice Oseman the highest of fives.

As contemporary YA fiction goes, I think Alice Oseman might be at the top of her game. UKYA is lucky to have her. I thought that when I read Radio Silence and I think it now, take this book – masterfully created with intricate, well thought out characters that you want to pop in your pocket and keep safe. It’s really really good, guys, really good.

Here’s the deal, then: Jimmy’s in a boy band called The Ark, and he’s sort of an accidental superstar. The band GOT BIG quite without him realising and now his life is all sold out stadiums and screaming fangirls who think they’re in love with him and who – mostly – seem to be obsessed with the idea of him having a secret relationship with his best friend and band mate. He can’t even leave his flat without causing some kind of twitter/tumblr mayhem. It’s part what dreams are made of and part what nightmares are made of and all of it is exhausting and its absolutely not good for his anxiety.


Then, on the other side of the coin is Angel. Angel is one of The Ark’s superfans. She lives and breathes this band, everything else is secondary somehow because they’ve made her feel like she has a place, made her part of something bigger than herself and honestly, she doesn’t know who she is outside of them. It’s not an exaggeration to say her life is built around this band, around other people who feel like she does about this band and whilst her parents are a little bit worried, for Angel, online with these people that get her is the only time she can really just be.

This story is their story, Angel’s and Jimmy’s, told over a week – a week when Angel heads down to London to visit her friend Juliet - a friend she’s only ever talked to on the internets but who she really feels knows the bones of her and vice versa - and goes to a fandom meetup and then to see The Ark, and Jimmy, in concert.

It’s a book that will be important I think to lots of people in lots of ways. Fandom or no fandom I think the things this book touches on are things we all feel at some point to a degree. That all-encompassing happiness, that feeling of belonging, but also that feeling of falling, of not knowing who you are or where you’re going. We’ve all been there, right? I’ve been there. It's wistful this book, but beautiful, full of complex feelings that you can’t vocalise, can’t understand until you’re feeling them. Jimmy’s anxiety for example: it’s so wonderfully done that it made my chest tight, so clearly and honestly was it portrayed. It doesn’t feel like it’s even trying this book and yet it continually hits so many nails right on the head and at the same time it’s also a really excellent story.

My thoughts are a little bit of a jumble here [WHAT IS EVEN NEW] so bear with me, it might make sense in the end.

So here’s the thing. It’s wistful, yes, but it’s also lovely and it really gets under the skin of what it feels like to believe in something.

It’s a funny old thing, fandom, and I’m 35 now so you can imagine things have come a long way from how they were when I was heavily involved, but even then, before the likes of Tumblr, when we spent our time on forums and on LJ, it was a funny old place – this place you could go where you could get excited about a thing, where you could live it and breathe it and theorise and talk and KEYSMASH with other people who got it, where you could analyse every. little. thing, where you lived in a bubble of fanfiction and fanart and DID YOU SEE THAT THING and you can form a bond with these other people who feel like you do and it all feels so real even though actually in some ways you're kind of removed from reality. Those people might be a million miles away but at the same time they’re right there and if you’re lucky, what starts as a shared interest in a tv show/book/band can become a lifelong friendship.




Alice Oseman gets that – she gets that connection, that friendship, and also the weight of expectation that goes with it and the way she’s written Angel taking that step from online friend to real life friend is just excellent.

I never went to a meetup in my fandom days, although they did happen: I was just never brave enough to get on a train and meet all these people at once, and I never went all out to try and meet the celebrities I liked - although my fandom experience was never real-person so much, I was more about the books and the tv shows than imagining my fave characters hooking up IRL, and RPF makes me feel a bit skeevy truth be told, (also the one time I met Darren Criss I became an incoherent puddle of mush and where is that photo omg I hope it’s not lost in my no longer existent Facebook, the horror) – but nevertheless I could relate to parts of this and I certainly witnessed this level of intensity even if I was always a bit removed from it. I Was Born for This does that whole thing justice, online friendships and fandom are realistically portrayed and I loved it.

I loved Angel – I loved her passion and her determination and her loyalty and I also loved her naivety, her inability to see beyond her Ark shaped bubble, and even as I gritted my teeth and thought jeez kid, get a grip, I loved her. Her character development in this book is so so excellent - I loved seeing her come into her own and figure out her shit. I also loved how she wore her hijab and said her prayers and it was never a big deal; it wasn’t a plot point, it was just who she was – this book nails diversity. Oh but that there were more books like this.

& then I loved how you got to see it from the other side, because as a fan you love this – in this case this band – so intensely and you can’t see it as anything but positive- and you know what, it is because we all deserve to get excited about whatever makes out weird little hearts happy - but from the other side, it’s not all rosy. I’ve witnessed it, to a degree, been out to dinner with a friend and been disturbed with requests for a photo, heard whispers of ‘oh my God it’s….’ as we’ve walked down the street, seen his shoulders stiffen almost imperceptibly as his catchphrases are yelled at him across a public domain and its hard. When you multiply that by a million screaming fangirls, who have your name as their twitter handle, who live and breathe your every move, who have no concept AT ALL of boundaries – it’s less flattering and more kind of terrifying and the guys in The Ark, they’re just kids too, just Angel’s age and they didn’t ask for this and they’re not equipped for this and they’re best friends in the same band that can’t even share a smile without breaking the internet and it’s intense and at times it’s too much.


Too much love can hurt you.

When it comes to being on the receiving end of the intense love of a fandom that might well be true.
Jimmy is a gorgeous character and a timely reminder that whilst that person you’re obsessing over might seem somehow removed from you they’re still a real person with a real life and real feelings and real demons. Don’t tweet the actors – that’s a thing, right? This book shows why that is a thing -because Angel watches Jimmy perform with a smile on his face, and has no idea that he’s spent days fighting panic attacks because the fact all he sees on twitter is rumours about him sleeping with best friend has sent his anxiety disorder into overdrive. Differing perspectives of the same story is one of my favourite things to read and this book DOES IT SO WELL. It’s what made the story so fascinating for me – Angel and Jimmy are such interesting characters, their motivations, their backgrounds, the decisions they make, nothing here is romanticised and it all gripped me. I couldn’t put this book down.



I loved it. I loved every single one of those messed up kids and I didn’t want their story to end. It’s absolutely worth a read.

I really enjoyed this and I’m going to be including it in the Illumicrate newsletter in our new releases section

This book is such an excellent exploration of fandoms, why we join them and love them.  Alice conveyed the intensity  of Angel's love for The Ark so well, a couple of times I had to remind myself they weren't a real band!

Jimmy is a diverse and complex character and I'm so glad the novel was split between his and Angel's points of view, rather than just having an omniscient narrator.  Whilst Angel is easy to identify with in so many ways, international pop star Jimmy is not, yet I really felt like I understood him.

'I Was Born for This' is a thoroughly engaging novel that I whizzed through, and I really would like to go and see The Ark on tour now please!

Alice Oseman has proved once again that she writes great books, books that challenge perceptions and bring important issues to light. This book was a very insightful look on Fandom and the different sides of it. I felt she really showed all the different sides of fandom, the perception of it from outside, from inside, the different types of fans and some of the more worrying reasons that people turn to fandom. She managed to write a book that showed what goes in inside the heads of superfans without ignoring the bad or the good.

Jimmy was a really interesting character. Through Jimmy Oseman showed anxiety at it's worse and she wasn't afraid to show it realistically. A lot of books try to pretty up anxiety showing it in a way that may be more palatable to the reader, but doesn't show truly how bad it can get. And while I did find some of Jimmy's part of the book a little hard to read, as a sufferer of pretty bad anxiety, I can attest that there is nothing in the book that wasn't a real thing that many people go through every day.

I worry that people will see it as immature and over the top, but the fact is that a lot of people view anxiety attacks as immature and over the top, because we're a society that values a tampering down of emotions and showing extreme emotions such as those that come in a panic attack or the other things that Oseman showed Jimmy feeling throughout the book are seen as immature in today's society.

I also liked the fact that there wasn't one part of fandom that Oseman didn't look into. She showed the pressure of fame and how it can bring those in the spotlight a lot of stress and pain and cause them to resent or fear their fans. She looked at the two sides of fandom as a group, those that didn't care who they hurt and the ones who would protect the band no matter what it took. She showed the friendship and happiness that being part of a fandom, part of /something/ can bring and she showed how people can let fandom consume their life due to problems or worries in their own lives.

I loved all the characters in this book and as always, how real Oseman's writing in. I hope you all do too.