I absolutely love Unbounds anthologies and this one also did not fail to disappoint! They are put together so well and I love the way a theme is explored from multiple angles, in multiple voices and that it gives a platform to diverse and emerging writers.

Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Really enjoyed this book despite its revelations on how unprepared our youth of today are to live mainstream lives. This made me question a lot of my own beliefs. Highly recommend.

Rife is a collection of stories about the problems that Britain's Youth face today. These stories and essays cover mental health, sexual abuse, financial problems among many more. The collection highlights the struggles and shows you how the knock on effect from the previous generation are so impactful today.

I won't lie, I struggled with this collection. This is for two reasons. The first being that I tried to read it in one gulp and Rife isn't really the kind of book you can do that in. It needs to act as a palate cleanser. Maybe a commute read. Secondly, I felt that it was a little bit southern-centric. There were a few stories telling how northerners struggle but the majority featured writers living in the south and without trying to create division there is a divide between the north/south experience. However, Rife is a gritty, engaging read and the essays in it shouldn't be dismissed.

Rife - Twenty-One Stories from Britain's Youth by Nikesh Shukla is available now.

For more information regarding Nikesh Shukla (@nikeshshukla) please visit his Twitter page.

For more information regarding Unbound (@unbounders) please visit www.unbound.com.

As with any essay collection, there were always going to be some chapters I enjoyed more than others. The ones that were less interesting to me were the ones I felt could have been Guardian arcticles, where the more engaging ones were more specific personal and different stories. Overall, this is a great representation of what it's like to be a young person in Britain today.

Very interesting group of essays a look at our world through the eyes of today’s youth.#netgalley#unbound

Such a difficult one to review. There are some really incredibly written essays in here, my favourite actually being the last one written by Tom Greenslade. A really powerful comment on the intergenerational divide in society that manages to hit all the right emotional beats without straying too far into preaching or whining (something that, unfortunately, happened with quite a few other essays).

I really got the sense that, even though these essays are written by people aged 16-24, some of them really strayed too far into angsty teen for me and lacked the nuance and balance needed for the essay topics themselves. It's understandable for some of the essays and their topics but it was too prevalent for me to rate this any higher than 4 stars.

Definitely worth a read. It is so refreshing for me to read young British voices and hear first-hand the struggles and issues they face socially and economically. It feels like a real snapshot of British youth today.

Thanks to Unbound and NetGalley for providing me with a copy for review.

Thanks to NetGalley and to the publisher for this ARC.

This book is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand how young people feel about today's world. It deals with so many issues - classism, racism, ableism, mental health, sexual abuse, politics - in a timely and sensitive manner. Each young voice is both interesting and insistent and should be listened to by all generations.

It made me so happy to read this brilliant collection of essays, all written by people under the age of 24. I remember when I was a teen the general consensus from “adults” was that we should shut up and grow up before having an opinion, something that I don’t think I ever listened to, nor did my peers. I know now that we were lucky – today’s youth are branded before they even open their mouths to voice an opinion. Instead of listening to those who will be making real change we try to silence and erase them. I know that at 41 I relate a lot more to what I read in this anthology than I do with many mainstream media types, so I am sure you will too.

I had personally never heard of Rife Magazine before picking up this book, but fell in love with the content and the approach. This is a platform created for the youth of today, by the youth of today, to talk about issues that directly affect not only the youth of today, but all of us. The essays in this collection are all brilliantly written and discuss a wide range of topics from racism, ableism, sexism, and ageism, housing, gentrification, family, tuition fees, economy, mental health, and many other important subject matters. I was born in England, but haven’t lived there since I was a kid, but I still related to most of the content written in the essays, as I’m pretty sure many people of different ages and backgrounds would.

This is what hope looks like – while a lot of the content discussed in these essays is bleak, it is not without optimism, and courageous fight to make real change together. Listening to these voices is important. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the copy, and thanks to Nikesh Shukla for compiling and editing such an eye-opening and important collection.

Really enjoyed this book despite its revelations on how unprepared our youth of today are to live mainstream lives. This made me question a lot of my own beliefs. Highly recommend.

An interesting collection of different stories written by a variety of young people.
Interesting read and concept.
It’s raw, brutal, honest and unapologetic.
Highly recommended
Thank you to both NetGalley and Unbound publishers for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for my honest unbiased review

I truly enjoyed the content of the writing and the subjects that were discussed, however, some of the writing was really bad. It seems like some of the pieces were not proofread. I would give this 5 stars if not for the writing.

In this collection of personal essays, young people reflect on the Britain that we are growing up in. Whether they're talking sexism and casual misogyny, racism, Islamaphobia, homophobia, poor mental health, lack of job opportunities, student debt, an unstable job market, 16 year olds not being able to vote- the topics are intelligent, thoughtful and expertly written. Each writer has their own little twist on the subject, but they all come from a place of personal experience. It adds another dimension to the writing and ensures that we're not hearing from the same voices or same perspectives over and over.

I personally identified with a lot of the work about university life and authors who struggled with their mental health during years that were supposed to be 'the best years of your life'. These are young people ready to talk and demand that they be heard. They are the ones growing into a society that is organized against them. We are angry and in debt and watching a world crumble beneath us because people forty years older than us are making the decisions. There is a running theme of Brexit throughout- it's a running theme of the country, so why wouldn't it be included- but it doesn't become hopeless. If anything, there's an optimism that we can be the generation to change things for the better by acknowledging the key issues now and starting to deal with them.

This is a brilliantly authored snapshot into what it's like to be young in Britain today. I would expect no less from something with Nikesh Shukla's name attached to it.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Thank you NetGalley.

True to the fashion of this style of book, some chapters / stories were better than others. That's how it normally goes. Some of these stories were truly great.. others were just meh. all in all, a good read.

Because I work on young people's writing in post-war Britain, I was excited to read this collection of essays by young people aged sixteen to twenty-four. Unfortunately, I was disappointed in most of these essays on a number of counts. Firstly, it has to be said: most of the writing here isn't very good. I know from reading blogs, short stories and novels written by young/er people, as well as from reading the writing of my own undergraduate students, that writers in their late teens and early twenties are as capable of producing wonderful and insightful prose as any other group of writers. However, I worry that others reading this collection will lazily assume that nothing better can be expected from young people.

The problem possibly lies in the way many of these essays were produced: rather than seeking out twenty-one independent contributions, a lot of these essays emerged from a single project at Watershed in Bristol, which produced Rife magazine. Whatever the process was, it seems to have encouraged many of these writers towards a ponderous and formal style; individual voice is smothered and a lot of the essays sound the same. Rather than drawing on personal experience, many of the essays pontificate on very familiar topics: the rental crisis, poor funding for mental health and university fees. (One essay on the university experience was particularly enraging; the writer rightly criticises high fees but seems to blame lecturers for not providing 'value for money' e.g. for going on strike over staff pensions, rather than government policies. I know from talking to my own students about these issues that many undergraduates are not this short-sighted).

My second problem with this collection is more an issue of personal preference. Most of these writers talk about their experience as young people by invoking the language of generational inequality; making the usual arguments about the unfairness of rising house prices, unemployment and student debt in comparison to the experience of their parents' generation. While I agree with these arguments, I was hoping that these writers might have more to say about the way that age itself acts as an oppressive category. This may in its turn result from the limited range of ages represented by the contributors. The majority are in their early twenties - already looking back on adolescence. The one essay that is obviously written by a teenager, 'Sweet Sixteen: Kiss, Marry, Vote', was one of my favourites. Amber Kirk-Ford effectively challenges the relevance of chronological age, arguing: 'If some sixteen-year-olds are disengaged or badly behaved, that is equally true of apparent grown-ups... [not giving sixteen-year-olds the vote] is based on the myth that all young people are exactly the same, and are less mature than adults'. Other essays worked well for me despite the fact that they weren't focused on questions of age because of the way they explored other intersectional identities; for example, Shona Cobb's essay on her experiences of living with Marfan Syndrome, 'Exclusion', and Mariam Khan's essay on being an hijabi, 'My Body, My Choice'. On the whole, however, while I think projects of this kind are really important, I've read much better writing by teenagers and young adults elsewhere.

Let me tell you, there is nothing that, as a 27 year old, makes you feel older than reading a book called Twenty-One Stories from Britain's Youth which then specifies that the nebulous Youth are ages 16-24. I will probably be drawing a pension soon.

But in all seriousness, this book was just great. It's a completely necessary middle finger to all the white, middle-aged male politicians who denigrate the so-called Youth for being unengaged with politics, misinformed and apathetic. This book goes completely against that ridiculous stereotype and shows that young does not mean uncaring.

As always in an anthology book like this, there are some essays which stand out more than others. The final essay in this collection is about how young people can learn from the elderly, and about how ageism affects both ends of the spectrum, and as someone who has taken on a carer role for elderly relatives in the past, this one in particular spoke to me. There are also essays on sexism, fatphobia, racism, the voting age, online harassment, mental health, and the pressures of university, amongst others. Many of these issues do not only affect young people, and it was simultaneously refreshing to see a new perspective on some of them and disheartening to realise that even young people are not protected from bigotry.

The essays on university life in particular were illuminating. As a 27 year old, I was part of the last cohort to pay £3k a year for tuition fees. My year group was the year who voted Nick Clegg into office and then experienced the betrayal of the tuition fee hike, but didn't have to pay up. It made me angry to see what students have to contend with today and the debt they experience because of it.

The voices in this collection are strong and important. The writing is fluent, persuasive and well-informed. I really couldn't find much fault with this collection; I'm sure there'll be the inevitable 'ooh, it's Leftist bias' nonsense from some people at some point, but the fact is that it's a representation of a microcosm of youth voices. It is indicative, not representative, of young people's viewpoints in Britain today, and it's about time that they were listened to. They? We? God, I'm old.

Many thanks to Unbound and Netgalley for an ARC of this collection.

Full disclosure, I was always going to love this as I think that anything Nikesh touches is golden.

This is a glorious collection of essays/stories from young people from across Britain. It touches on almost every topic imaginable and provides wonderful insight in to the trials and tribulations of what it is to be young (16-24) in the UK today. Whilst I am no longer in this bracket (equal parts sadness and joy) I could relate to what each of the writers was talking about and really engaged with the topics and the conversation being had.

For most stories I wished I could pick up the phone and speak with the writer to discuss it more and have an actual conversation about it - this is the sign of a strong collection for me.

In addition, worth mentioning that there is a content warning at the start of each story and this will alert anyone to any potential triggers and this is very handy and I think just a perfect representation of the consciousness of the younger generation today.

Absolutely loved this and cannot wait to get my hands on a hard copy when it is released! 5/5.

As with all books that are in this format, some chapters are better than others. For the majority of them I found them very well written and offering great insight into the chosen subject. The book features essays from young people on mental health, disability, poverty, racism and sexism among other things. I read it quite quickly and overall I really enjoyed it. It also feels quite unique that its all young voices.