Radio Silence by Alice Oseman

Grades are the most important thing in the world. Or are they? Frances has built her whole life around the lie (IMO!) that getting the best grades is the most important thing. She’s a self-labelled “study machine” and all that’s ever mattered is getting into Oxbridge, until she makes friends with Aled. He’s clever like Frances, but unlike her, he hates the thought of going to uni, hates the pressure, hates all the expectations. 

I LOVE THIS BOOK. I remember feeling so awful around exams and working out my future, that all the pressure had the opposite to the intended effect: I just checked out. And because everyone else had all these ideas of what was important, I lost all sense of who I was. Some of Frances's experiences just felt so familiar.

The characters in this book are so great and so relatable, that it’s actually a problem for me that I can’t be real friends with them.

“What happens when you say no to the one thing everyone expects you to be? what happens when you craft your own future, when you nurture that one strange hobby that nobody knows about, when you give yourself to something that truly makes you happy?”

This book is for anyone struggling with #examstress #pressureabouththefuture and #findingyourself.

Video review here