Pretending

This was the book I needed to read. Holly Bourne is my Yoda. She always has been, always will be. Bourne’s writing doesn’t sugar coat the realities of life, love and mental health. Instead, she makes it the new normal. She makes me the new normal.
While the character of April could, in another writer’s hands, feel cringeworthy and ‘unlikable’ Bourne gives the reader the extra character balance and insight to remove the stereotype checklist and make her relatable and someone the reader understands.
Bourne is the Queen of first person narratives. It allows the reader to feasibly relate or, at the very least, empathise.
This book charms, educates and opens the reader up to question how relationships impact our identity. It’s not just thrown together either, this is a well researched, sensitively provoking rather than a fashionable theme shoehorned in.
Thank you, Holly Bourne, for constantly breaking ground and being the trailblazer we all need.

Beautifully written. Any book that makes you cheer out loud at the last page is worth recommending to everyone you’ve ever met, in my humble literary opinion.

I had to stop reading on a couple of occasions, purely because April’s negative self-talk bares such a striking resemblance to my own, I needed to step away for a moment. Holly has perfectly captured every female relationship neurosis and delivers it back to us, sometimes uncomfortably accurately.

This book deserves all the amazing success I know it will achieve, and I for one will still be cheering. Well done for broaching the difficult stuff, your bravery as a writer will have such a huge impact. Be proud.

A very touching read, hits a few nerves with me as I could see so many shared traits it’s scary reading them and seeing your own flaws reflected back at you, but as always Holly does everything so sensitively and handles everything carefully, it’s so well written and researched, it’s an emotional read as Hollys books always are, but powerful and uplifting and full of hope. Uncomfortably accurate at times, but worth the discomfort, a wonderful powerful read.

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion

April is tired of men. Every time she thinks she's found a man she can trust, they've proven to be awful and she ends up heartbroken. She's nice, she's normal, but she wishes she could be more like her imagined perfect woman: Gretel.

She's the cool girl, the manic pixie dream girl. She's everything April should be, in theory, so that's who she becomes, as an act of almost-revenge. And when she tries out this new persona, she meets Joshua. The problem? He seems different than the rest.

This started as an unsuspecting book. An easy read. Then as April's work with charity, the nuance of how trauma can impact people, fear of being rejected as yourself, flaws being exposed, not being good enough, all began to unfold - the book swept me up. Funny, nuanced, touching, brilliant. Really liked this one.

Pretending by Holly Bourne is maybe the greatest novel I’ve read in the last few years. Not because it’s set to be a literary masterpiece and win the Man Booker but because it represents the experiences, feelings and hurt of so. many. women. It is a cuddle to every woman out there who has been through an experience that they shouldn’t have had to at the hands of a man. And, whilst I promised myself I wouldn’t turn this review into a rant - I feel like every woman has some experience of feeling threatened, belittled and/or abused by a man. And so many men just DON’T get it because they come from a place of male privilege. Even intelligent, gentle and kind men I’ve met in the past have not understood their privilege purely by being a man. And, despite me describing experiences to them that made me uncomfortable, they can’t see anything inherently wrong with their male peers. It’s a continuous cycle of explaining what it’s like to be a woman and then being told your feelings aren’t valid and perhaps you’re overdramatising something etc continue ad infinitum. My favourite story of male privilege was when I complained to HR of the company I worked for that I felt my (male) boss was being sexist and I felt uncomfortable in the workplace. His (lol, yes, male HR) solution was ‘it’s not that bad, in 20 years time you’ll just look back and laugh.’ GOD how I wished I had the balls to do something about that. Instead I just sat there gormlessly.

ANYWAY, this novel is wonderful in so many ways. It is witty, moving, educating, accessible, relatable and, most of all, honest. It isn’t a laugh a minute and there is some hard-hitting stuff within the pages but I think it highlights the plight of so many women of being abused at the hands of a partner or lover who they think they should put up with because they love them. It restored my faith in women and gave me a sense of strength to keep pushing through the male dominated spheres in my world. It was also strangely cathartic and provided me with the chance to reflect on my own experiences and re-validate them and confirm that I’m not just being ‘overdramatic’.

There was one line in the book, that I can’t remember word for word so please excuse my crude interpretation, but it was something along the lines of this:

Statistics say that 1 in 4 women will be raped but actually it’s more like 1 in 4 women WON’T be raped.

And it just hit me so hard in the feels. And WOMEN, we are strong and beautiful, and we put up with SO MUCH. And please just read this book.