Finding Audrey

Product Information

Audrey is a brave, charming and resourceful girl and I hope she will inspire my readers as much as she has inspired me. Audrey’s mother was quite crazy about the possibility of Audrey’s brother Frank being addicted to video games, and went to ridiculous lengths to try and stop him from playing. I tell Linus I’ll pay because this is my documentary and I’m the producer, and he says OK, he’ll get the next one.

I did want more focus on it, but I appreciated that we also got to see Audrey in her own messy element, with her family and challenging her social anxiety. Audrey can talk through her fears with Linus in a way she's never been able to do with anyone before. Even though my lizard brain is poised to curl up in fright, I’m managing to put one foot in front of the other. Thanks to the friendship of her brother and her brother’s friend Linus, Audrey learns to grow as a person. Though this book perfectly displays what it is like to have social anxiety and depression, Audrey is still more than just her illnesses and I feel this book properly showcases the struggle that million of people go through.

You know, the prize pot in the international LOC competition in Toronto this year is six million dollars! I love Sophie’s books, have never been disappointed with any of her books, and I wasn’t with this one. Audrey's family is hilarious and every character was so well-written and real; I adored them all even though everyone had their own quirks!

And I’m not even talking about the romance because although there may be a little romance, it’s not really romance-romance. As I started to tell Audrey's story, it became apparent that I was telling a story which would appeal to young adults, and it turned into a young adult book. The mother was intense and annoying sometimes, but mostly I found her arguments with Audrey's brother, Frank, supremely funny. She suffers from social anxiety, a condition I know about, but she also has a positive, quirky worldview and a great sense of humor. When I first began this, I was wary that her sense of humour wouldn't be able to translate into a YA novel with a teenage character, but I was wrong.Seven: compete professionally (for the game in the book, this seems like the natural final step because it seems like a very tournament-heavy game. Just because you manage to do something that causes you anxiety once doesn’t mean the anxiety goes away the next time you try to do it… it’s always there and portraying it as this thing that can be so easily overcome is really insensitive. She constantly wears sunglasses (even inside her own house) because making eye contact with people triggers panic attacks. Below us, on the front lawn, Frank is scampering about in his Big Bang Theory T-shirt, clutching his head and gibbering with panic.