🌿BOOK REVIEW🌿

The Yearbook by Holly Bourne

“”You’re allowed to red pen yourself” he said. “To scribble out your past beliefs if you’ve learned better.””

Paige is an outsider at her high school and she likes it that way. She finds comfort in working for the school newspaper but this crumbles when the ‘popular’ girls join to design the yearbook. When Paige retreats to the library she notices an annotation in a book that she resonates with deeply. She then begins a hunt to find the person behind the red pen!

I have absolutely no idea how Holly Bourne does it but she manages to transport you straight into the story and you can feel the emotions of the characters so strongly.

This is a great exploration of the horrors that can be high school with adolescents going through puberty and becoming more aware of themselves and others, and inevitably bullying increases. It also discusses domestic abuse between Paige’s parents and its impact on Paige and her brother. As always, Bourne covers the topic with such grace and care alongside highlighting warning signs.

It was beautiful watching Paige’s and Elijah’s relationship blossom as they finally find someone who understands how they feel. Although very different situations, both characters explore the importance of supportive family and friends.

I highly recommend this one but as always with Holly Bourne’s books please check the trigger warnings before picking it up!

TW// domestic abuse, emotional abuse, bullying

I want to first say that I am quite clearly not the target audience for this book and therefore will be rating from a viewpoint of someone younger than I.

I think the target audience will really enjoy this book, it covers a lot of difficult issues but in a really accessible way. The characters are fairly lifelike and i think the writing style works really well for the story too.

Holly Bourne is an excellent author of both YA and New Adult fiction, and The Yearbook is her latest YA work. Her books always cover difficult issues and always have a message of strong women and feminism which I love. The Yearbook is maybe not my favourite of hers, but I think it will appeal to a lot of young people who will recognise the 'mean girls' in school.

What a great story for all high schoolers to read. This highlights bullying in such a way and shows how damaging it really is.
It’s message was an important one and with social media being such a huge part of life I think lots of young adults & adults could relate to living a fake life like Paiges Dad, and how important it is to tell the truth.
I loved the friendship that was built between Elijah & Paige, it was perfect for the story.
Great book really enjoyed it.

I went into The Yearbook with high expectations of Secondary School nostalgia mixed with classic Rom-Com tropes; where Bullies would get their comeuppance, the protagonist would get their crush, and everyone would learn a good, well meaning moral lesson by the end of it. However, that is not what I got, and honestly, I’m so beyond disappointed. This book is misogynistic, the characters are elitist and there’s little I found authentic about it. I could not recommend this to those who like YA Contemporaries or Romantic Comedies, because you’ll find little of either in this book.

My main issue can be summarised into the fact that, whilst this book does suggest it will look at Bullying in a school setting (and at home), it does nothing to indicate the pervasive neglect and abuse Paige (the protagonist) is going to feel within her own home. Her father is an angry, abusive, sadistic individual. There’s a discussion around the page 200 mark where Adam (Paige’s brother) and Paige discuss how awful their father is, ‘but at least he doesn’t hit us.’ Whilst the bullying depicted at school is childish to the point if silliness, the way Paige is treated by her dad is disgusting. Amongst taking every chance to humiliate everyone he’s supposed to care about, repeatedly, he also undermines people, ignores Paige unless it’s to punish her. At one point he calls her a ‘slug’ over and over again until she cries. And then claims it was ‘just a joke’.

This will quickly become the mantra of all bullies, in all situations. ‘It’s just a joke, don’t be so sensitive.’ My main issue with this, is that it’s tacked on as a response to any thing offensive said, whether someone could realistically ignore it, or not. So when her dad says it, it merely echoes the cruel kids at school. But I really believe this is a dangerous depiction of parental abuse. Whilst the submissive mother tends to neglect Paige, glamorising every action of Adam’s to the point of ignoring Paige, the dad goes from disinterested, to abusive at the drop of a hat. And what baffles me, is it’s a sub plot. The main drive of the narrative is that Paige will get her revenge and share the truth via the yearbook. Except, those actions don’t take place until the end. In the meantime, the audience just has to observe the awful things happening to Paige and her peers.

The main premise of the story is that Paige, the quiet and painfully passive protagonist, is forced to work on the school book. However this, and the love interest narrative of meeting Elijah via a note swap session in their favourite books, quickly takes a backseat to the abuse narrative of Paige’s home. However, if we were to take a minute to discuss the main narrative; the plastics Paige rails against are verbally vicious in a way I’ve never (even with my teaching experience) seen in real life. Spreading malicious rumours, and unfounded gossip for the sake of attention – which is ripped straight out of the film mean girls, but without the forethought for how this would impact a real world setting.

And all of this happens to a character we should empathise with, that we should feel sorry for. Except even that is impossible because Paige is so busy judging people, and putting expectations on them to suit her own needs, that you kinda can’t help but hate her. (Not enough to deserve the way she’s treated, just enough to disengage from the story.) She mocks other students when she think she’s smarter than them. She barely speaks up for other students, and the one time she tries – it back fires. So she doesn’t try again for another hundred pages.

All in all, I just couldn’t with this book, and I DNF’d at page 276. At which point, I no longer cared what the father’s consequences might be. It was punishment enough to get to that point for me.

Holly Bourne is one of those authors that I know of, but I’ve never read anything from before. Nor had I ever planned to. Her books didn’t look like my sort of thing. Until The Yearbook. The premise of a girl getting back at her bullies using the lies they wanted her to put in the yearbook? Genius. I’ll be honest, this book was nowhere near what I was expecting. But it was still an easy and enjoyable read. Just…a much more emotional one.

Paige is a quiet girl in school. The way anyone would ever know her is through the school paper. She planned to keep out of it all until Grace and her friends bring the yearbook to the newspaper. Now as well as spreading lies in the paper? Paige has to bring up all these false or cruel memories in the yearbook too, and she hates it. The only person who could understand her is Elijah, and it’s him she turns to as she figures out what to do.

This sounds pretty epic. But when I started reading, Paige at first annoyed me. She saw others being bullied, but she didn’t say or do anything. I was bullied. And I went out of my way to try to make sure other people didn’t feel as alone as I did. Unless they were actual dicks, but those were few and far between. Only Paige has a reason for this, one I didn’t guess from the summary. It said her family wasn’t perfect, but what isn’t obvious is that it’s abusive. Her home situation is bad, and Paige suddenly makes a lot more sense. Being quiet and staying out of things is how she survives at home. Of course, she’d do so at school too.

I truly felt for Paige, and I’m glad she has her Aunt. Her brother frustrated me. I get that he had uni and had to look out for himself, but I wish he’d been checking on Paige more. Trying to look after her too in some ways. I didn’t expect him to come home or take her with him. Either of those would have been ridiculous. But he could have been emotionally and virtually there for her more.

The family issues and Paige being terrified of standing up to people is most of the novel. It isn’t until the end that the yearbook plot stuff actually comes into play. I’m not going into detail, but that was a lot of fun. I just wish there had been more of it. I’d expected a novel focused around it. Instead, it just felt like bonus content at the end of all the drama. I’m glad Paige did it though, she kicked ass,

There is some romance in this book with Paige and Elijah, and I enjoyed it. They had a lot of cute banter, and even the stuff with the rumours was so funny. I was giggling. He was there for her when she needed him, even if he was a little pretentious and he was a good guy. The fact he scribbles in library books in a pen all the time pains me though? Please only annotate your own copies, dude. That would have been a pain back in school.

The final thing to note is that there’s some fun formatting in this book. The back of bathroom doors, notebook notes and yearbook pages etc. There’s a lot of little illustrated additions to pages, and I really liked that. It gave the book a bit more of a visual feel, and it’s fun to flick through. They might not be proper pictures, but it just feels more fun.

I might not have read what I expected to read, but I did still thoroughly enjoy it.

The Yearbook encompasses so many different themes but it is brought together in such a way that you live the life of the main character Paige.

Paige is in Year 11 and on the school newspaper, but when the popular girls ask for help from the newspaper committee to put together the Yearbook Paige has some big decisions to make.

Paige feels like she is invisible nobody at school really knows who she is and at home it is all about her dad or her older brother. So to make her mark in the world she writes 'I exist' is lots of different places.

One day in the library she finds another lost soul and the start communicating through notes - and then finally meet.

With their friendship growing Paige finds the courage to stand up to the Popular girls who are also bullies and to her dad.

The book deals brilliantly with very hard hitting subjects of bulling and emotional abuse.

A must read for any teen.

This book spoke right to my heart. It brought back the not so pleasant memories from my school years. It’s not all bad and not always feels like an impossible task to go to school. I was so proud of Paige, finding her voice. And I felt so much sorry for her and the things she had to endure besides her school life. We all need more books like this to remind everyone that bullying is a problem, that’s OK to yourself and that there is somebody out there. You are not alone.

The Yearbook is a book anyone who didn't have the best time in high school will resonate with. Honest, frank and very real. You connect and feel for the characters. Another triumph from Holly Bourne who writes YA books that have mass appeal and defy age, as anyone of any age can enjoy her books.

Thank you to Netgalley and Usborne Publishing for providing me an eARC in return for an honest review.

TW: Body shaming, bullying, suicidal thoughts, self harm, domestic abuse.

The Yearbook by Holly Bourne brings out the brutal side of secondary school bullying and how school isn’t a pleasant memory for everyone. The main protagonist Paige works for the yearbook and is the silent observer that notices everything that happens in school especially the bullying done by fellow class girls and notes them down in her journals for years. She doesn’t retaliate or step in for any of the victims out of fear of being the next target. Her home situation isn’t that great as well as she has to suffer in silence through her father’s domestic abuse, unable to get any help from her brother or aunt. Her only outlet for the rage she feels against all the injustice around her, is her journal and also annotating on her library books. In one of the library books, she notices a like-minded person’s scribbling on red ink and tries reaching out to the stranger.

“Can we read old books the whole way home and share the best bits we find in the margins while eating mint Aeros please? “

Up until Paige meets red-ink the story was progressing at a very slow pace.
There were a lot of trigger warnings that made me think school is definitely scary these days. But for all the anger that Paige has, the ending didn’t justify it. Like it feels powerless and not enough.
Also the bullying is more focussed on the mean girls and not on the guys, and the way teachers chose to ignore it, showing all of them in a bad light was also slightly disappointing.
I loved the friendship that evolves between red-ink and Paige and kept looking forward to their encounters. Overall a 4 star read for me!

I expected that ‘The Yearbook’ by Holly Bourne to be a YA story of a quiet girl named Paige who wants to expose the lies and fakery that makes up the ruling, popular crowd at her school. I was wrong; Bourne has written a heartfelt and brilliantly crafted story of the importance of kindness in a world based on fictions and filters rather than authenticity.
This kind of book is the reason I love YA as a genre because in general it pushes the boundaries of what topics can be discussed without bias or judgement. Paige as a central character has minimised herself at school and at home to keep others happy but when she discovers red pen messages scribbled in her library books she starts to track down the author. They develop a friendship outside of the pages of their favourite novels and in turn Paige begins to believe in herself and that life can be more than a simple existence. Paige witnesses injustices at home and throughout school and as her final year comes to a close she realises she can leave her own lasting imprint.
The beauty of this book is that no matter our age we can all feel lonely or invisible and may need the support from others to find our own inner courage.
“...with hope, and love, and encouragement, you can start to believe a different tale about yourself.”

Paige spends her school days hiding in the library and attempting to attract as little attention as possible. To stay safe is to remain invisible and she hopes this is enough for the rumours and judgement from her peers to fall on someone else instead of her. For this week, at least.

The gorgeous colour scheme and the renown of Holly Bourne's name prompted me to pick this novel up. I read few contemporary stories but when I do they are almost always centred around an academic setting. Usually I prefer these to be isolated or elite and feature a cast of pretentious characters. This school felt very reminiscent of my own, and the cast of characters were also ones I felt are universally present in schools. I was surprised by just how much I could relate to the protagonist and just how much I enjoyed, no matter how painful it was, a school experience that so closely mirrored me own.

The focus was also on Paige's struggles outside of school and the harrowing home-life formed just as much a central theme in this novel. These two aspects were equally as hard to read about and Bourne crafted an emotional and sympathetic account of Paige's suffering.

I am much older than Paige and yet still found so much to appreciate here. I can imagine how formative a novel this would be to those of Paige's age, or younger, and going through a similar set of experiences. Bourne instructed the reader on how to behave without ever preaching on how to do so or judging her characters when they failed at it entirely. It felt like a very authentic novel, as bullying is unfortunately present in so many adolescent lives, and ended with a hopeful message I greatly appreciated.

The Yearbook is an enjoyable read dealing with teenage angst, first love and entrenched bullying in school. Although set in the UK this book has an American vibe and sentimentality. Bourne has created an enjoyable narrator in Paige, but there is nothing new here that hasn't been explored before...think Mean Girls. The bad girls will get there comeuppance, the studious girl will get the guy, nothing will be as bad as it seems. Having said that the family dynamic of Paige's family is deftly handled, exploring the darker side of relationships and controlling abuse that defines those captured within.
For a YA reader there is a lot to recommend.

Paige is solitary: she keeps to herself at school, and even at home with her family, because it’s safer that way. When she finds annotations and messages in school library books from the mysterious Red Pen, she may have found someone who actually gets it and sees past the fakery of so many of her peers. However, opening her heart to someone does not come easily and nor does the impending rush of the truth... I absolutely loved this book; Holly Bourne is a fantastic writer with the unique ability to cut through to the truths of modern teenage life, whilst enrapturing us with romance and hope.

I went into this book expecting a particular vibe based on what it was being likened too in its advertising and it wasn't quite what I was expecting. I was expecting light, teenage drama however Paige's character provided a lot more depth to the story and it made for a thoughtful and engaging read. Though I personally can't relate to the MC, there is bound to be many who will.

I really enjoyed this book. When I first started it, I wasn’t sure if it would be a little too YA for me (I love YA) but as I got into it I loved it so much! It was such a moving and emotional read, but it also featured lots of lovely, funny scenes too - especially when Elijah and Polly were around.

This book tells the story of Paige, who is quiet and keeps to herself. She hates school as the popular kids are bullies and to keep herself safe she spends much of her time in the library and doesn’t interact with many people. Whilst at the library, she finds a book with red pen notes inside and finds the words “I exist”. Paige regularly reminds herself of this and knows she has found a kindred spirit in this person! So, Paige goes on a hunt to find who has been writing in the books.

Paige is also on the school paper so is roped into helping the popular kids put together their yearbook. Unsurprisingly, Paige has a different view on the school experience to the popular girls and has to decide whether to stand up for those who are bullied, or keep herself to herself and avoid conflict.

Alongside this, we have the heartbreaking plot of Paige’s home life. Her dad is an abusive parent and husband to her mum. His abuse is mostly emotional and psychological. He is angry and cruel to them all, especially Paige, who he pretends doesn’t exist much of the time. Paige finds comfort in the kindness of her Aunt Polly, who was a favourite character of mine.

It was such a great book that handled some really heavy topics in a really good and respectful way. Some of the content to be aware of is: domestic abuse, emotional abuse, psychological abuse, bullying, panic attacks, slut shaming.

Thank you to Netgalley and Usbourne Publishing for this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

As insightful and relatable as ever, Holly Bourne's latest offering, 'The Yearbook', is a delight to read!

The story explores the live of Paige, a Year 11 student, who goes about her home and school life being as invisible as possible, figuring that that's better than the alternative of being hurt. Readers get to follow her journey as she slowly learns to find her voice and 'reveal' herself to her peers.

As always, Holly Bourne writes about deep and potentially traumatic experiences in an honest, yet humourous way, and it definitely took me to straight back to my own experience of secondary school!

The book lost a star for me as I felt like the story didn't match the blurb, so I found it harder to manage my expectations and kept second guessing where the 'takedown: of the yearbook girls would occur. In addition, I would have liked to see Paige and her new friend, Elijah, to have stayed as friends, rather than have a romance blossom, just to reiterate that you don't need a boyfriend to find yourself. However, these two niggles are just personal preferences of mine and didn't deter from an otherwise great story.

Overall, another wonderful read and I will definitely recommend 'The Yearbook' to other readers!

Holly Bourne is the queen of clever land funny feminist YA. I dont think we'll know the true impact of her work for years to come, but the Yearbook is another brilliant offering that captures the frustrations of teen years

Paige is a girl after my own heart. At least, the introverted, clinging-to-walls part of my heart, which, like Paige, I've mostly grown past. And like Paige, it was slow and painful and I took much longer than she did.

Of course, my school was also not as bad as this one. I was in shock reading some of the things these girls thought were ok, but sadly I had no problem believing it could happen. Kids that age can be vicious. (People any age can be vicious, but most adults can understand the long term consequences of their actions. Kids can't.)

Paige's home life broke my heart. I don't want to spoil too much of the story, but it was really rough, in an unusual kind of way. I felt so bad for her, and so happy that she had Aunt Polly.

The romance - well, I think they worked really well as friends. I was actually half expecting Red Pen to be one of the popular girls, to make a point about subversion, but it worked really well this way too. They made a great team and I loved their enthusiasm about books. (It's always the same books though! No one ever loves the less famous novels.)

I loved this book, I loved the comedy and the scary parts and the heartfeltness of it, I loved Paige's first tentative attempts to fight back and her huge dramatic gesture at the end. This is a great read and I will be recommending it.

I loved this book. Holly Bourne is fast becoming a must-read author for me. She writes so brutally and truthfully about the teenage experience that I'm transported back.

The only comment I have is on the blurb. I was expecting the big revolution to come far sooner and be the bigger focus. I wasn't prepared for the family issues or for Elijah to be the focus. I'm not sorry that they were but I think the blurb was slightly misleading.