Finding Audrey
by Sophie Kinsella
Middle School, High School     Delacorte     287 pp.
6/15     978-0-553-53651-5     $18.99
e-book ed. 978-0-553-53652-2     $10.99

Audrey wears dark glasses all of the time, “even in the house.” But it’s not out of excessive devotion to her movie-star namesake; it’s because she’s afraid. Of everyone. We learn, incompletely, that “some stuff” happened to her at school, that three classmates were expelled as a result, and that Audrey herself will be attending a new school come fall. While Kinsella never details the bullying Audrey experienced (which makes its power all the more terrifying), she persuasively charts Audrey’s gradual healing with the help of an understanding therapist and a boy who, over the course of the story, becomes more than a friend. For those who know Kinsella only from her popular Shopaholic series for adults, this book will seem surprisingly layered and serious. That said, there is plenty of leavening social comedy, mainly delivered via Audrey’s mother, a loving and scattered parent obsessed with how much time Audrey’s older brother spends playing video games, who perhaps takes her Daily Mail tabloid reading more to heart than is really good for her: “It’s all the fault of these evil screens. Some children your age can’t even get up off the couch!”

From the July/August 2015 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.