Hennessy’s books are always packed with strong female characters who are troubled in some way. For Lauren, she’s struggling with issues with her best friend, her kind of rubbish boyfriend, and the main issue of the novel, every teenage girl’s worse nightmare.

My main problem with this book – and I suspect that it was actually written to be this way, meaning that I just didn’t click with it, not that it’s a bad book – is that Lauren is actually not a nice or empathetic character at all. Despite (or perhaps because of) being a teenager identifying herself as LGBT and struggling with the usual issues that most cisbodied teenage girls deal with (periods, hormones, body confidence, etc), she has little to no empathy for the issues that her friends and colleagues are dealing with. Rather it seems like she identifies her own issues as paramount, and brushes anything anyone else might be dealing with to the side.

Now, in a lot of ways this is actually incredibly true to life. Everyone is fighting their own battle, and it seems most of the time (especially when you’re a teenager) that nobody has it as hard as you, and nobody understands what you’re going through. And while that’s true, nobody has the exact same struggle, everybody has some degree of empathy, and if you reach out, you’re likely to find a great deal of support.

Lauren, certainly, doesn’t have it easy in the book. Alone and isolated, without support, she finds herself struggling to obtain the help she needs because of the backwards country she lives in. Hennessy writes with honesty and no small amount of disgust about the near-total unavailability of abortion in Ireland and the struggles pregnant women in Ireland face to obtain control over their own bodies. This is an issue I feel passionately about, and as far as this book deals with it, it is absolutely spot-on. Lauren isn’t especially likeable, and she doesn’t have any tragic circumstances which would ‘justify’ her control over her own body, but she’s presented sympathetically and honestly, and if this were the bulk of the book, it would have been a stellar favourite for me.

But where I thought Like Other Girls fell down is that it throws in a whole lot of other issues at the same time, and I felt like this made it lose focus. The narrative also considers several of Lauren’s trans friends, and Lauren’s reaction to her first sapphic experience (I think… it’s not entirely clear in the book) as well as the struggle of her mother becoming her school principal and the difficulty of the rubbish school musical (when Lauren is a massive musicals fan, and would have been excited to do any of the classics).

Now, again, I realise that real life is messy, and issues don’t pop up one by one to be dealt with in order in nice book-sized chunks. Life can be a clusterfuck and things will all seem to happen at once. And the author does do a good job of representing that. But with something as hugely important as access to abortion services in Ireland, I felt like it deserved more focus in the book than it actually got.

My other issue with this book was actually the title. Or perhaps not the title, but the way it was presented from the blurb. While Lauren is self-aware, and notes that she’s not like ‘other girls’ in her school inasmuch as she’s something of a loner, but it’s problematic to depict the other girls as something less than valid and full human beings, the final two lines of the blurb set this story up as if Lauren would try to hide her ‘other-ness’, her queerness. But she never does that. Lauren is never anything less than 100% herself, trying to deal with life as best she can, and not denying any aspects of herself.

I like the idea that the title could be read differently, that Lauren would like other girls – referring to her own identity as bisexual – but I think that might actually be me reading too much into it.

So, overall, this book had absolutely stellar parts. For wit and pop culture it was spot on, and its handling of issues of access for Irish women to abortion services was absolutely heartbreaking (in a good and important way) but I felt like the book sometimes had too much going on, and lost its impact along the way.

What a book. I grinned, I groaned, I was tearful on public transport. Lauren is bolshy and confused and angry and upset and hurting, and I loved her.
Another book I want to push into absolutely everyone's hands - if you want to have any clue about life in modern Ireland, especially for young people, you need to read this book.

Lauren is a teenage girl in Transition Year in an Irish Catholic Girls school. She has become disconnected from her friend Steph, who has a secret Lauren can’t understand, and from her mother, who is the new Principal at Lauren’s school, and who’s new job has stopped them from being able to communicate properly as mother and daughter. Her school production of an out dated musical is another reminder to Lauren that the way she sees the world differs hugely from those in her school, and in Q Club, a club for LGBTQ youths, where she would have expected to meet people that think like herself. Even things with her new boyfriend seem to echo these feelings, and when Lauren is faced with a nightmare situation, she has no one to turn to. This was a compelling read that I was sorry to finish.
Like Other Girls made me angry. I am 25 and this is the first fictional account I have read of an Irish woman travelling for an abortion. Lauren’s story was so painful to read, because I wanted to help her and couldn’t, and because this story is far more common than we would like to believe. Her experience of a ‘counselling’ service that lied to her about her options, and preyed on misinformed women, many of whom who did not speak fluent English and were even more vulnerable than Lauren, was also striking and forced me to come to terms with the privilege some people seeking to terminate a pregnancy in Ireland have over others.
In countless other smaller ways Like Other Girls made me angry, because Lauren articulated so well how it feels to live in a body that seems constantly to be under siege, under surveillance and something that belongs to the state and not herself.
Unfortunately, Lauren also made me angry in what I felt to be her unfair and often hypocritical treatment of her other LGBTQ friends, particularly her trans friends. While she says she knows the ‘Like Other Girls’ idea is problematic, she still dismisses her classmates before getting to know them. However, I feel that early reviews of this title have demonized Lauren and the book as a whole, purely because the character isn’t as well informed as she should be. This made me more angry than anything else. Lauren said many things in the book that made me uncomfortable, but this is not the sign of a bad book or an even character. Lauren, by the end, seems to be genuinely trying her best to speak to and about her friends respectfully and fairly. I didn’t always like Lauren, but a thoughtful and considered reading of the book should be enough for any reader to see that Lauren is no more perfect, and should not have to be more perfect, than anyone else.

This book deals with many things that were not even thought about when I was in my teens. So I am probably of the wrong generation this book is aimed at.
But I am a Mother of teenagers and found this an interesting read and don't understand the one star reviews on Goodreads. I have given it 3 stars which would probably be higher if I was a young adult.

I read this in one day. If it wasn't for the inconvenience of a work day, I'd probably have finished it in one sitting. Lauren is not a perfect person and, like a typical teenager, her emotions sometimes react before her brain does. But I was rooting for her all the way through. Like Other Girls manages to tackle topical issues like abortion and transphobia without being an "issue novel". A thought-provoking and compelling read with strong relatable characters.

I found the protagonist's strong voice and outspoken nature really refreshing, and I thought the book dealt with some challenging issues.

Although the description should have reassured me, I was concerned about this book because of the title.
But it was SO GOOD. It was really clued up, well written, interesting, funny, and fun.
Ellie was my favourite character though and I so would have loved more of her.

The title of this book got my back up, but I think it's supposed to, and to be honest, that didn't end up being related to what I didn't like about it.

On the one hand: this book dealt with some tricky issues, it had some engaging friendships, and it managed to get in some queer jokes that were terrible in the best way (because if your fictional queers don't make puns are they even really LGBTQ?). There were some feelings. It was reasonably well-written.

On the other hand: Lauren spends about 70% of the book being extremely transphobic and behaves horrendously towards her trans friends and acquaintances, and although she sort of gets better about it and they become friends again, I never felt this was addressed ENOUGH and some of her attitudes didn't change when they should have done. Plus the way she talked about things was cissexist even when she was trying to be supportive; I hated the fact she kept referring to "lady parts" and so on, and talked about periods as a girl problem. (Fun fact: bleeding out of lower orifices does not make me a woman! Signed, a grumpy agender person who menstruates.) She dismisses her former best friend's dysphoria in a way that's just... really thoroughly unpleasant.

Like I said, she sort of learns. But sort of isn't enough. Lauren likes to pretend to be all enlightened and describes things as "problematic" and gets fed up of straight people, but all the while she's harbouring seriously transphobic thoughts and attitudes that she never fully 100% deals with. Nor does she ever give a proper, thorough apology to the people she hurts, but they seem to forgive her anyway.

I thought the abortion narrative was important and thoughtful and far too realistic given the current situation in Ireland, but I found the transphobia in the book difficult to deal with, because although other characters do call Lauren out on it, she never seems to fully understand exactly how nasty she's being. Moreover, since she's part of the LGBTQ community (she's bi), it was a painful reminder of the fact that the T part of the community can't depend on the LGB to have our backs and not be jerks, because they can be just as bad.

I don't know. If she hadn't improved at all this would be getting one star, because frankly, there are enough transphobes in the world without having to read about them. She *does* improve, and the story has other redeeming features, but I found it really uncomfortable to read.

Because I think this book's harmful aspects outweigh its positive ones (I think it would be really unpleasant to read for younger trans people, and to be honest, if I'd read this two years ago I would've found it more damaging than I did reading it now), I don't think I'll be reviewing it on my blog, although I have written a review on Goodreads.

Some aspects of the story didn't sit well with me (small example, why did Lauren's mam, who is also the principal of her school, discuss home situations with Lauren on school time?)

Lauren herself was a complex young lady. Obviously, for a large portion of the book you do support her, but there were some of her actions that I couldn't stand behind.

Overall, this is a great and harrowing telling of the reality of seeking a termination for countless Irish women on a daily basis. We need this book.