Australian author Ange Crawford's compassionate YA debut features a 17-year-old doing her best to appear "normal" at her first "real" high school despite a lifetime of chilling family dysfunction.
Astrid has been homeschooled since her father determined that the family unit is a "tool against the capitalist machine" that must be directed and controlled accordingly. He monitors everything Astrid and her mother eat, wear, and do. But when he loses his job, Astrid's mother must go to work and Astrid starts state school. While the teen is an expert at interpreting her dictatorial dad's moods, high school is a strange and thrilling new world of cursing peers, artificial ingredients, and tentative freedom. Her love for her father clashes painfully with her growing understanding that coercive control is a form of emotional abuse. "Sometimes," she thinks, "love, fear and control are all the same thing." Growing relationships with classmates and her disowned older sibling confuse, excite, and calm Astrid while creating electronic music becomes an escape and an exploration: "I am holding down that same note... twisting it and distorting it, until it wavers like me, and without words it tells everyone how formless I feel under all these lies."
In the gracefully insightful How to Be Normal, Crawford is sensitive to the challenges of seeking and accepting support in circumstances like Astrid's. Crawford shows Astrid's world expanding incrementally as the teen explores her sexuality, her identity, and the possibility of a future free from control. Fans of Jandy Nelson and Helena Fox should be drawn to the deep and dark mental maneuverings of a teen in unsettling transition. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor