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A review by minorasimulator
Losing It by Julia Lawrinson
4.0
had to sleep on my opinion of this one, but here it goes.
I originally picked up this title in a Booktopia Easter weekend sale and as it's been sitting on my shelf fairly untouched for the past two years, I thought it was about time I picked it up. My tastes have changed a bit since I got it, and a book about four girls who challenge each other to lose their virginities before 'schoolies' week wasn't something I was keen on.
I was wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It consists of four stories of girls exploring their sexualities bookended by the creation of the challenge at the start and the culmination of the challenge at the end. The stories take place in chronological order of the challenge-induced sexual activity, and they also look at the friendship dynamic up to their final year of school. It has characters from different family structures, ethnic backgrounds and sexualities. I originally thought that the narrative voices would be too similar, but that wasn't the case at all, with each character reading so completely differently.
This is the bit where I talk about the issues I had.
Firstly, there was some really glaring editing issues. This book was initially published in 2012, and I got this copy in 2016, so I would have thought that perhaps things like that would have been cleaned up already. Secondly, I started thinking about half-way through that this book was set in Western Australia, and I got confirmation of that right at the end when they mentioned both Scotch College and PLC in the same sentence, and I still had to double check by googling the author. It's extremely clear that this book has been edited for an Eastern States audience. The target audience at the time of publication would have started high school in Year Eight, not year Seven, which explains some later discrepancies in terms of character age at the start of HS (Mala being 13, for instance). In WA, we also call the week-long celebration at the end of school 'leavers', which is another reason it took me so long to figure out. So yeah, my main issues with this book is that the editing made it far more accessible to the Eastern States rather than, you know, the people in the state where it's set. But I'll leave that for now and go back to things that I like.
Overall, I thought this was a really heartwarming story about friendship and exploring sexuality. I don't think I could say I'd have enjoyed this book more when I was in high school, but I definitely think I would have benefited from having read this earlier in my life. There are some trigger warnings for both rape and incest, but these aren't explicit and they're only suggested at in terms of side characters (but they're still there). I enjoyed this far more than I thought I would, and I'm looking forward to picking up more of Lawrinson's work in the future.
I originally picked up this title in a Booktopia Easter weekend sale and as it's been sitting on my shelf fairly untouched for the past two years, I thought it was about time I picked it up. My tastes have changed a bit since I got it, and a book about four girls who challenge each other to lose their virginities before 'schoolies' week wasn't something I was keen on.
I was wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It consists of four stories of girls exploring their sexualities bookended by the creation of the challenge at the start and the culmination of the challenge at the end. The stories take place in chronological order of the challenge-induced sexual activity, and they also look at the friendship dynamic up to their final year of school. It has characters from different family structures, ethnic backgrounds and sexualities. I originally thought that the narrative voices would be too similar, but that wasn't the case at all, with each character reading so completely differently.
This is the bit where I talk about the issues I had.
Firstly, there was some really glaring editing issues. This book was initially published in 2012, and I got this copy in 2016, so I would have thought that perhaps things like that would have been cleaned up already. Secondly, I started thinking about half-way through that this book was set in Western Australia, and I got confirmation of that right at the end when they mentioned both Scotch College and PLC in the same sentence, and I still had to double check by googling the author. It's extremely clear that this book has been edited for an Eastern States audience. The target audience at the time of publication would have started high school in Year Eight, not year Seven, which explains some later discrepancies in terms of character age at the start of HS (Mala being 13, for instance). In WA, we also call the week-long celebration at the end of school 'leavers', which is another reason it took me so long to figure out. So yeah, my main issues with this book is that the editing made it far more accessible to the Eastern States rather than, you know, the people in the state where it's set. But I'll leave that for now and go back to things that I like.
Overall, I thought this was a really heartwarming story about friendship and exploring sexuality. I don't think I could say I'd have enjoyed this book more when I was in high school, but I definitely think I would have benefited from having read this earlier in my life. There are some trigger warnings for both rape and incest, but these aren't explicit and they're only suggested at in terms of side characters (but they're still there). I enjoyed this far more than I thought I would, and I'm looking forward to picking up more of Lawrinson's work in the future.