Half My Life - Diana Noonan
This is a book I was given as a free giveaway at a English Teachers conference I was recently a part of. It was an easy enough read, but not one I am likely to use with students.
Katie is a New Zealand teen of Greek heritage (on her father's side) who has a few issues in life: she has a distant relationship with both of her parents (though particularly her father), she hears voices and deals with pain by pulling her own hair out, her wheelchair-bound boyfriend, Luke, has a secret he is ashamed to share with her, and her parents are about to drag her out of New Zealand at short notice - missing the ball! - to go back to Greece and visit her dying grandmother. This is all set up in the first few chapters, though the elements that takes up the most early page-space are Katie's mental health journey and the side-swipe of Luke's coming revelation.
Then, all of a sudden, all this plot is put down and Katie heads to Greece. Her she is dropped into a new set of problems: communication in a non-English speaking world, a rebellious cousin who seems to be stealing from the family, the estrangement between her father and his family, a suspicious stranger who might be a little too interested in Katie and... no phone coverage. This final point is important, not just for Katie, but for the book as a whole because it means that there is no development of the Luke plot for almost the entire rest of the book. Something built up as hugely important (and his secret is extremely traumatic) is pushed aside and only addressed in the final scenes, while new plot (and a lot of it!) takes its place.
Everything does come together by the end, with the various mysteries being solved, various family issues worked through, and Katie gets a moment to play the outright hero of the book, but the sudden shifts in plot does make the book a little bit of an odd beast.
However, the main reason I would hesitate to recommend this to my students is the mental health aspect. Katie is very depressed/anxious at times, and deals with this by OCD tendencies and, as mentioned earlier, by ripping out clumps of her hair. The author is showing this on purpose, because (of course) by the end of the novel Katie has faced a lot of the issues that are keeping her down and is beginning to heal, but the decision to keep Katie struggling for so long, alongside the first-person narrative which highlights how much better Katie feels when she does pull her hair out (while acknowledging to herself how she shouldn't be doing so) means that the reader is unwittingly being shown the benefits of such actions far more than the downsides for a good portion of the narrative. It is a brave decision by the author, and one that I can understand from a story-telling perspective, but I would be hesitant to put this book into the hands of any students who are struggling with depression or anxiety in case it accidentally inspired such behaviour.
So... an okay one-time read, but not one I'm likely to revisit.
Completed 7 July 2023.
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