I think she slips up at one point-she has Kyle talk about “year groups”, which should be grades in the US-but for the most part, the “British fish in American waters” trope is strong here. She also has a lot of fun in the vocabulary and cultural differences between the US and the UK (“poo-dank” hehe). Aided by her travels across the country, Bourne includes enough geography and some rich descriptions of Yosemite National Park. It’s amusing watching a UK author write about the States. How Hard Can Love Be? neither sugarcoats nor sensationalizes the life of a recovering alcoholic and her estranged teenage daughter: Bourne carefully distills the truth, for all its vinegar. And, yeah, Amber says some harsh things, does things that might not be advisable-but it all makes sense in the context of what she has gone through. We see her mom’s pain, the daily struggle of a recovering alcoholic-but we see it through the eyes of the child whom it has affected so dearly. Nevertheless, despite the first-person narration, Bourne still manages to portray Amber and her mom’s fraught relationship with depth and complexity. After all, in addition to being the protagonist, she is also a teenager, while her mom is a parent. My sympathies lie, for the most part, with Amber. Amber is afraid of losing control as a result of her experiences with her mother. She drinks and generally gets up into mischief … yet, paradoxically, there is steel beneath this carefree exterior. Obviously, since Amber doesn’t share Evie’s anxiety and compulsiveness, she is more whimsical in how she behaves. So it’s good that Bourne can write more than one UK teenager. She’s guilty of it-but that’s a good thing, right? Nothing is worse than an author who can’t write characters with unique voices. I charged Amber with the crime of not being Evie at the beginning of this review. Trigger warnings for the book and this review: alcoholism and child abuse/neglect. Nevertheless, Bourne again demonstrates her pitch-perfect characterization of teenagers and their parents and her mastery of the ambiguous happy ending. I’m not as big a fan of Amber as I am of Evie, so it was hard to let the latter’s voice go. With some nice summer weather (finally), I decided it was time to tackle the sequel, wherein Amber spends a summer in America, working at a summer camp run by her mother and stepfather.
That was Evie’s story of her struggle with OCD and related issues. It has been nearly a year since I read Am I Normal Yet?, the first book in Holly Bourne’s Spinster Club trilogy.
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