You Only Live Once by Jess Vallance

          3.5 Stars

Grace Dart is 16 and a bit of a hypochondriac - after a week in Southern Spain she is convinced that she has some rare tropical disease (ah the curse of googling symptoms!) and she admits to having her local doctor's surgery on speed dial.  What we also need to know about Grace is that she is all about the future - everything is geared to that magical point in the future when she will have the perfect job and the perfect life to go with it.  So you can imagine how cheated she feels when she thinks she is going to die just after taking her GCSEs - all that time wasted revising when she could have been living.

That, in a nutshell, is why Grace's very reason for living becomes all about seizing the moment.  Admittedly, she still wants to plan her spontaneity but it's a start - right?

Told entirely from Grace's point of view the author gets a teenaged girls voice spot on.  From the insecurities of what she is doing with her life and the dogged self deception to the wry humour.  It perfectly captures family life and does make you grin along the way.  From cutting friends out of your life because a "better offer" comes along to realising that what you see isn't necessarily the truth of someone else life and how to deal with loss it is all there and over the course of only 1 summer.

I genuinely enjoyed this novel, it did make me laugh as I could see some of my 16 year old self in Grace (sadly, not the studious bit).  I'm not too sure how the 16 year olds would feel about the character but as someone who was 16 year and raised a child past 16 it certainly rang very true.  I have to give a nod to the way Grace's coming out was handled - her parents going "yeah, we know" - was such an accepting way to handle the subject and one I only wish more LGBTQ people got to have as an experience.

Fun, frivolous and will happily fill a wet and rainy afternoon!

I RECEIVED A FREE COPY OF THIS BOOK FROM READERS FIRST IN EXCHANGE FOR AN HONEST REVIEW.