I saw an article talking about this book and how it was being adapted into a movie, so I thought I'd see if it was any good and boy did I love this book.
This book is told from Elise's perspective, she is a depressed teenager who doesn't have any friends and somehow in a lot of the latter half of the book is a lot more rational and calm than I would be if I was in her position. I found myself very involved in her story and thinking about her wellbeing while I was in the middle of this book which led me to read the majority of it one day because it was so interesting. There is a list of songs at the end of the book which are either mentioned in the book or songs that the author thinks would be common in Start and I would recommend that you download the songs and put the playlist on shuffle when you're reading this, I left it till after I was already finished and I'm pretty sure the book would've been a lot cooler if you were listening to it as you were reading. My favourite character in this book was Vicky, I wish that Elise had opened up to her more because when she told her all about her problems at the end I'd wish I'd known the depth of her character for more of the book. I would recommend this book to people who like young adult fiction, especially if you're a bit of a music lover.
The book starts seven months after Elise's suicide attempt, she is back at school and still has no friends except for the two girls she sits with at lunch and has no real interests in her life. She suffers from insomnia and because her parents are not the most observant she sneaks out every night and just walks around the streets listening to her music. One night she meets Vicky and Pippa who are going into an underground club called Start where they play the music Elise loves and people are nice to her. She starts going to Start every week and soon develops a weird friends with benefits type relationship (excpet not with sex) with Char, the DJ. He teaches her how to DJ and starts to let her DJ for an hour or two during each of his sets on Thursdays. Elise soon learns that someone was posting a fake online diary claiming to be her talking all about how much she hates her life and wants to kill herself and the head of Start offers her her own night DJing when he opens it for Fridays. The next time when she goes to Start Char is jealous that she getting Fridays all to herself and won't let her DJ and Pippa returns and yells at Elise for dating Char when she knew she liked him, she breaks down in front of Vicky and her band and goes home and destroys her sister's huge project that she had been working on for months so that she wouldn't be weird like she is. Her mother then kicks her out of her house to stay with her father who lives too far away from Start for her to get there so she calls her friends Sally and Chava who she sits with at lunch to take her to Start and they tell her that they're her friends even though she didn't think so. Once she gets to Start her dad finds her because the online journal posted that she was going to commit suicide that night and one of her classmates informed her dad. Her mum and dad then go to the principal to get the journal taken down and the perpertrator punished, and her dad takes her to Start the next Friday for her first night as DJ. She lets Vicky's band play a set that night because she had promised her and her dad tells Vicky he wants to set them up with his old agent as he used to be in a band. Elise ends up asking Vicky's brother Harry to her school dance with her the next night and she realizes that being herself should be enough for her.
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