I'm going to go ahead and say it. I'm so sorry Holly Bourne fans: I found this book difficult to read. Don't go off fan-girling on me, because I know how powerful it is. I have my reasons.

Bree is an outcast sixth form student at private school Queen's Hall. She is a rejected writer who keeps submitting a manuscript on a suicide attempt, and she copies Stephen King by attaching all rejection letters to a nail like he did. She asks her English teacher Mr Fellows why she keeps being rejected, along with her friend Jeremy (who renamed himself Holdo after Holden from Catcher In The Rye), and both of them suggested she make herself slightly more interesting. So she decides to change her life around and be cool. She chats to her mum and they go shopping for different accessories, new dresses and most drastically of all, she goes blonde in her quest to go get into the perfect posse. The posse includes the popular people: Jassmine, Gemma and Jessica, and the dream guy Hugo. She doesn't account for many problems, one of which involves her teacher.

Now don't get me wrong, this book was not a complete fail for me. The strong issues were handled incredibly well, including self harm, bullying and teenage body image, and I think Holly Bourne should be commended if anything for this.

The characters were nothing but true to what schools in the modern day have: the perfects and the outcasts, and this was handled brilliantly too. I admire the way this was handled and I have heard that the same was done in Soulmates.

Here come my criticisms. First of all, it seems like this book was at one point encouraging people to change their personalities through Bree's sudden change and conforming to the stereotype, something which I don't think you should advocate.

There were far too many sexual references in this book. Now, I understand sex and the like are parts of teenage life, however this book contains way too many jokes, references and even a detailed description of Bree's encounter with Hugo. I don't read a book to find out about all of that; if I wanted detailed descriptions I would have read 50 Shades of Grey.

I liked the book in some respects. The issues are tackled well, but I just didn't appreciate the seeming advocacy of the changing of people's personalities, the sexual references or the fact that the storyline was just one big cliché for me. If this is your thing, I implore you: go read it.

I call it: "The One Book Example on How To Be Interesting."

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