Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Simon Pulse (2009), Hardcover, 224 pages
Description
Six months after her mother's death, seventeen-year-old Holly finds some happiness in a secret affair with Paul, a boy she barely knows, but after becoming friends with Paul's girlfriend, Saskia, Holly worries that her best friend, Nils, or Saskia will learn the devastating truth.
User reviews
LibraryThing member stephxsu
Torn apart by her mother’s recent death, Holly loses her virginity to Paul, one of the most popular guys in school. Holly assumes that once it’s over, she’ll go back to hanging out with her only friend, Nils, the boy-next-door turned “man-slut,” and Paul will go back to his long-term
NOTHING LIKE YOU, Lauren Strasnick’s debut novel, is relatively short, but packs one heck of a punch between its covers. It is a powerful read that will wreck your nerves, put them back together, and wreck them all over again.
Lauren Strasnick’s succinctness with words is still a relatively rare gift in YA lit. Sometimes, less is more, and it certainly is so in Holly’s words: little time is spent dallying over inner monologues, and instead we are thrown right into Holly’s words and have to quickly learn our way around her friends, family history, and romantic problems, otherwise we’ll unhappily sink and miss the point of the book. I like how Lauren’s writing style doesn’t undervalue the reader’s intelligence: we are all capable of figuring out what’s going on, and it is this agency on our part that will make us invest more in Holly’s story. Who says it’s the author who needs to do ALL of the work?
This may be personal preference, but I adore Holly’s character. In particular, I love how relatively upfront she is about her emotional concerns. This is a girl who’s not afraid to express to others how she’s feeling, instead of bottling it all up inside her, so that her problems are constantly evolving and moving forward. It’s a trait that I envy, and so it’s refreshing to read about such a girl in YA lit.
Holly and Nils’ friendship was well done, specifically in that you can practically feel the chemistry crackling between them. In contrast, Paul feels a little underdeveloped. He is definitely a douchebag but I wanted to know why he feels like he needs to behave that way. NOTHING LIKE YOU further defies our expectations of contemporary literature with its unusual ending, which, like every other part of the book, garners its power from its absence of flair for the sake of grabbing attention.
True, Holly’s mother died, and a lot of her behavior is in reaction to her grief, but this is not explicitly a story about dealing with grief, for which I am grateful. Instead, it’s simply an honest and refreshing tale of contemporary emotions. Lauren Strasnick has embedded herself into my heart with her unassuming debut novel, and I have no doubt that she will do the same to others.
Show More
on-and-off girlfriend, Saskia. But suddenly Paul keeps chasing her, and Holly’s actually becoming friends with Saskia, who turns out to be a great girl who doesn’t deserve all this, and suddenly Holly’s in way over her head, dreading the moment when everything will come to a head and fall apart around her.NOTHING LIKE YOU, Lauren Strasnick’s debut novel, is relatively short, but packs one heck of a punch between its covers. It is a powerful read that will wreck your nerves, put them back together, and wreck them all over again.
Lauren Strasnick’s succinctness with words is still a relatively rare gift in YA lit. Sometimes, less is more, and it certainly is so in Holly’s words: little time is spent dallying over inner monologues, and instead we are thrown right into Holly’s words and have to quickly learn our way around her friends, family history, and romantic problems, otherwise we’ll unhappily sink and miss the point of the book. I like how Lauren’s writing style doesn’t undervalue the reader’s intelligence: we are all capable of figuring out what’s going on, and it is this agency on our part that will make us invest more in Holly’s story. Who says it’s the author who needs to do ALL of the work?
This may be personal preference, but I adore Holly’s character. In particular, I love how relatively upfront she is about her emotional concerns. This is a girl who’s not afraid to express to others how she’s feeling, instead of bottling it all up inside her, so that her problems are constantly evolving and moving forward. It’s a trait that I envy, and so it’s refreshing to read about such a girl in YA lit.
Holly and Nils’ friendship was well done, specifically in that you can practically feel the chemistry crackling between them. In contrast, Paul feels a little underdeveloped. He is definitely a douchebag but I wanted to know why he feels like he needs to behave that way. NOTHING LIKE YOU further defies our expectations of contemporary literature with its unusual ending, which, like every other part of the book, garners its power from its absence of flair for the sake of grabbing attention.
True, Holly’s mother died, and a lot of her behavior is in reaction to her grief, but this is not explicitly a story about dealing with grief, for which I am grateful. Instead, it’s simply an honest and refreshing tale of contemporary emotions. Lauren Strasnick has embedded herself into my heart with her unassuming debut novel, and I have no doubt that she will do the same to others.
Show Less
LibraryThing member PhoebeReading
I finished Lauren Strasnick’s first novel, Nothing Like You at 4 a.m., with a lump in my throat the size of a fist. This was strange because her book didn’t contain any of the usual tear-jerker tropes for me: dead grandparents, dead dogs. It is, of course, a story of loss—but that loss (of
Show More
the narrator Holly’s mother) happens off-screen before our story even begins. Nothing Like You is in fact the story of how Holly attempts, and largely fails, to deal with her mother’s death. It opens with Holly losing her virginity to Paul, a boy she hardly knows and mostly doesn’t even like. I think it was mostly the tone of the book—sparse and melancholy—that hit deep. The raw emotional honesty is clear in passages like these:"She’s my girlfriend, Holly. I have to kiss her." But he didn’t have to kiss her. He didn’t have to date her or love her or run his fingers through her hair. It’s a choice, love. Even if she were threatening pills or razorblades, blackmailing him into loving her, the least he could do was look miserable loving her back.I mean, ouch.But the plot is accurate and affecting, too. As Holly becomes involved with Paul, a preppy teen whose girlfriend she also ends up befriending, we learn about the complexities of her world: her best friend, Nils, who everyone assumes is her boyfriend; her father, Jeff, who Holly frets over; the psychic she considers visiting to gain some closure over the loss of her mom to cancer. There’s nothing particularly unusual about Holly’s situation, but it’s the accuracy of the details—the clubhouse she shares with Nils, and the records they listen to; her memories of her New Age mom’s crystal conventions; the small connections she makes to a drama teacher who once knew her mom—that make this novel exceptional. Though the language is very contemporary (there is an occasional text-speak aside or instance of multiple exclamation point, though these are dropped naturally and do not seem intrusive or gimmicky), Holly’s situation rang true for me. Though I ended my high school career in 2002, I couldn’t help but feel like I knew Holly, or girls very much like her.Hell, there were times when even I was a Holly—when I made stupid, selfish choices, believing them to be justified or even romantic, because I wanted an escape from my suburban life. Holly’s California suburbs are a world apart from the universe of my New Jersey adolescence, but her experiences are no less universal. That she can’t see, for example, how she’s being manipulated by Paul—their relationship has an almost-violent and certainly-threatening undercurrent—makes her sadly accurate, though sometimes a little pitiable. I’ve seen some reviews online that decry the poor choices Holly makes, but I can’t help but wonder, in response, if those reviewers were ever teenagers who lived in the shadow of grief.That’s how I can’t help but feel about most complaints about Strasnick’s debut. Yes, Holly makes poor choices. Yes, she has to live with some really miserable ramifications. No, this story does not give you an easy, neat, or morally clean ending.But it’s real. It’s so very, very real.I can’t help but draw comparisons between Nothing Like You and Kody Keplinger’s 2010 debut, The DUFF. They both involve girls who use sex to escape their bigger real-life problems. However, where Keplinger faltered was in the accuracy of the situation—in the rosy ending, and the way everything tied together perfectly. And that’s where Strasnick excels. If Keplinger’s book is something akin to a pretty good movie about high school--Pretty in Pink, maybe—then Strasnick’s book is high school. And though the ending is sad, complex, and emotionally messy, there’s also a note of bitter sweetness there, one that will likely seem truer to older readers and one which makes fewer saccharine promises to younger ones. Though Holly’s future will be as complicated as her past, as she embarks on it we know that, though it might not always be easy, it really will be okay. Show Less
LibraryThing member nbmars
Sixteen year old Holly lost her mother six months previously to breast cancer, and never really dealt with the pain of having done so. There was fear as well: her mother was only forty-two: would Holly get breast cancer and die young also? Holly’s dad Jeff hasn’t been much help: he still
Holly somehow ends up losing her virginity with the popular and good-looking Paul Bennett, who has a popular and gorgeous girlfriend named Saskia. Holly knows it was wrong – wrong enough that she won’t even tell Nils about it - but she has been so numb since her mom died. And having sex with Paul made her feel “the opposite of dead, really what I’d been striving for…”
Inexplicably to Holly, Paul keeps calling her, and soon is sneaking over her house at night several times a week to have sex with her. He told her Saskia was “saving herself.”
As Holly tries to cope with her jealousy over Paul’s continuing relationship with Saskia, her feelings get even more complicated when she gets to know Saskia and discovers she really likes her. Meanwhile, Holly and Nils discover what they have may be more than friendship. Holly tries to break it off with Paul, but Paul threatens to tell Saskia if Holly won’t continue to have sex with him, and Holly doesn’t want to hurt Saskia.
What Holly ends up doing has wide-ranging repercussions for everyone, most of all for herself.
Discussion: In some ways this book is simple and predictable, and yet it poses some questions that are really worth consideration and discussion. To what extent does Holly bear responsibility for what choices she made? The book doesn’t come down either way, although the negative consequences of Holly’s actions suggest otherwise.
In my opinion, rather than blaming Holly, there are three mitigating factors that should be considered:
(1) Holly received no counseling or help after her mother’s death. True, she never asked for any, nor did she give any outward indication she needed any. I wish, however, it could be assumed that any young teen in that position would benefit from professional help.
(2) Teenagers are notoriously unable to exercise perfect impulse control (and in fact recent research shows that teenagers are apt to process emotional states through the amygdala rather than the frontal cortex, although it is only the latter that governs reason and forethought). Alcohol only makes the situation worse. I think many teens are told not to drink because it’s “bad” or "illegal" or will “rot their brains” without a good understanding of why it actually may be “bad” for them. They see their parents drink and the message gets filed into the “adults are hypocrites and don’t want us to have any fun” mental drawer. That isn't a good form of ammunition to protect oneself against peer pressure.
(3) Holly tried to break it off with Paul several times, but Paul was guilty of manipulation, stalking, and dishonesty. Somehow Holly had to come up with the confidence to be assertive and still think of herself as “nice” or at least "justified" in order to exercise control over her own body. Such a skill is not something generally taught to young girls, especially vis-à-vis popular boys. Yet as usual, the female takes the blame and pays the price.
Evaluation: I think this is worth reading, particularly if you have a teenaged girl.
Show More
hasn’t changed a thing in their bedroom – all her mom's clothes are still in the closet, all the makeup still on the dresser… Holly’s best friend and next-door neighbor Nils tries to talk to Holly about it, but she won’t let him. Holly somehow ends up losing her virginity with the popular and good-looking Paul Bennett, who has a popular and gorgeous girlfriend named Saskia. Holly knows it was wrong – wrong enough that she won’t even tell Nils about it - but she has been so numb since her mom died. And having sex with Paul made her feel “the opposite of dead, really what I’d been striving for…”
Inexplicably to Holly, Paul keeps calling her, and soon is sneaking over her house at night several times a week to have sex with her. He told her Saskia was “saving herself.”
As Holly tries to cope with her jealousy over Paul’s continuing relationship with Saskia, her feelings get even more complicated when she gets to know Saskia and discovers she really likes her. Meanwhile, Holly and Nils discover what they have may be more than friendship. Holly tries to break it off with Paul, but Paul threatens to tell Saskia if Holly won’t continue to have sex with him, and Holly doesn’t want to hurt Saskia.
What Holly ends up doing has wide-ranging repercussions for everyone, most of all for herself.
Discussion: In some ways this book is simple and predictable, and yet it poses some questions that are really worth consideration and discussion. To what extent does Holly bear responsibility for what choices she made? The book doesn’t come down either way, although the negative consequences of Holly’s actions suggest otherwise.
In my opinion, rather than blaming Holly, there are three mitigating factors that should be considered:
(1) Holly received no counseling or help after her mother’s death. True, she never asked for any, nor did she give any outward indication she needed any. I wish, however, it could be assumed that any young teen in that position would benefit from professional help.
(2) Teenagers are notoriously unable to exercise perfect impulse control (and in fact recent research shows that teenagers are apt to process emotional states through the amygdala rather than the frontal cortex, although it is only the latter that governs reason and forethought). Alcohol only makes the situation worse. I think many teens are told not to drink because it’s “bad” or "illegal" or will “rot their brains” without a good understanding of why it actually may be “bad” for them. They see their parents drink and the message gets filed into the “adults are hypocrites and don’t want us to have any fun” mental drawer. That isn't a good form of ammunition to protect oneself against peer pressure.
(3) Holly tried to break it off with Paul several times, but Paul was guilty of manipulation, stalking, and dishonesty. Somehow Holly had to come up with the confidence to be assertive and still think of herself as “nice” or at least "justified" in order to exercise control over her own body. Such a skill is not something generally taught to young girls, especially vis-à-vis popular boys. Yet as usual, the female takes the blame and pays the price.
Evaluation: I think this is worth reading, particularly if you have a teenaged girl.
Show Less
LibraryThing member MVTheBookBabe
Due to copy and paste, formatting has been lost.
To be honest, I thought that I would like Nothing Like You a lot more than I actually did. It was a sad, sad disappointment. For one, I was kind of expecting some kind of forbidden romance, which did not happen. Not that it's a bad thing, because,
He totally is. He's manipulative and controlling and a liar, demanding and pretentious...he's everything that a good boy shouldn't be. He's a total jerk! He forces his way into Holly's life and ruins it for her. It may take two to tango, but sugar, she sure didn't ask for you. She tells him to go away and leave her alone, so he basically stalks her and then blackmails her. I want to beat this boy to death, and I'm generally not a violent person.
But I don't feel like Paul was the only culprit. Like I said, it takes two to tango, and Holly did her own fair share of screwing up. Mostly by choosing Paul to bide her time with. I feel like this book is actually really sad. She makes such bad decisions, and she doesn't seem to have enough backbone to get rid of the douche, so I'm fairly sure that I'm not a big fan of her as a character. Which sucks, because I really wanted to like this! She just let him step all over her, though...I can't take that. She also kind of wonders if cancer is contagious...sigh. But not only did she screw up with Paul, she screwed up with Nils and with Saskia, both of whom I liked.
They were both completely broken by some of the decisions that she made, and I just couldn't help but feel absolutely terrible for them. Saskia was just so sweet, and well, Nils was adorable. Holly, Nils and Saskia all had such fun times together, but....it got ruined so bad.
Basically, I just wish that Holly knew that she was better than all of this crap. She doesn't have to let Paul drag her around like a caveman, and she never should have done it. I'm not real sure how it started, but I know that it sure didn't end well.
All in all, I wish that I could have liked this book more, but it was bogged down by some flat characters and a story that I just couldn't get. I liked bits of it enough for it to receive two stars.
To be honest, I thought that I would like Nothing Like You a lot more than I actually did. It was a sad, sad disappointment. For one, I was kind of expecting some kind of forbidden romance, which did not happen. Not that it's a bad thing, because,
Show More
well, (cover your ears) Paul is a douche.He totally is. He's manipulative and controlling and a liar, demanding and pretentious...he's everything that a good boy shouldn't be. He's a total jerk! He forces his way into Holly's life and ruins it for her. It may take two to tango, but sugar, she sure didn't ask for you. She tells him to go away and leave her alone, so he basically stalks her and then blackmails her. I want to beat this boy to death, and I'm generally not a violent person.
But I don't feel like Paul was the only culprit. Like I said, it takes two to tango, and Holly did her own fair share of screwing up. Mostly by choosing Paul to bide her time with. I feel like this book is actually really sad. She makes such bad decisions, and she doesn't seem to have enough backbone to get rid of the douche, so I'm fairly sure that I'm not a big fan of her as a character. Which sucks, because I really wanted to like this! She just let him step all over her, though...I can't take that. She also kind of wonders if cancer is contagious...sigh. But not only did she screw up with Paul, she screwed up with Nils and with Saskia, both of whom I liked.
They were both completely broken by some of the decisions that she made, and I just couldn't help but feel absolutely terrible for them. Saskia was just so sweet, and well, Nils was adorable. Holly, Nils and Saskia all had such fun times together, but....it got ruined so bad.
Basically, I just wish that Holly knew that she was better than all of this crap. She doesn't have to let Paul drag her around like a caveman, and she never should have done it. I'm not real sure how it started, but I know that it sure didn't end well.
All in all, I wish that I could have liked this book more, but it was bogged down by some flat characters and a story that I just couldn't get. I liked bits of it enough for it to receive two stars.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Ash600
Rating: 3.5/5
Favorite quote: "And how now that time had passed and sex seemed suddenly easy, I’d somehow managed to make up for any physical pain with barrelfuls of emotional pain that seemed directly proportionate to the amount of pleasure I took in the actual act. I suspected I was being
Such a sad and bittersweet coming-of-age story narrated by a sorrowful voice.
Holly comes across as a strong unbreakable girl; but inside she’s hurt, lonely and fearing what took her mother away from her will get her eventually too, as she constantly keeps on checking her breasts for lumps. It’s been six months already and she misses her just as much, she keeps all her things, listens to her favorite CDs and tries to recall every memory she has of her, so she will never disappear from her mind. But the pain sometimes can be too much to bear and she gets tired from feeling numb.
When she loses her virginity to Paul Bennett, a.k.a the star of her high school and the boyfriend of sweet perfect Saskia; her life changes drastically. She’s keeping secrets from her best friend Nils; she’s stabbing some girl in the back, but all she could feel was freedom.
"I suddenly had a secret. And it made me feel guilty, yeah, but I also felt really fantastic. I felt the opposite of dead, really what I’d been striving for, and someone suddenly wanted me in a way I hadn’t been wanted before. I didn’t even mind having to keep things to myself. I mean, I thought the whole situation was really unfortunate, but I knew that I was the one he wanted more. That if she weren’t so fragile, so unstable, he’d be with me for real. No Saskia. No secret."
Just for the record, Paul is a prick; going behind his girlfriend back and not having the guts to leave her because she’s supposedly fragile… if you fear for her and care about the girl don’t go around sleeping with other girls you little piece of shit. He was taking advantage of Holly’s state, making her believe she was more important than Saskia, while in fact, all he was doing was manipulating her and enjoying the fact that he has her at his beck and call for whenever he felt in the mood of having sex with her.
""It’s so much better with you. It’s easy. It feels right with you." I loved this. When he compared me to her. Things were easier with me. I was better than her."
Eventually, she grows tired of so many secrets, the guilt burdens her each day more when she finally gets to know Saskia and they become close friends, and with Paul blackmailing her into revealing their dirty little secret and things brightening up between her and Nils, I could smell trouble from miles away. So when shit hit the fan, everything crashed and burned in the worst possible way for poor Holly.
That’s the part I didn’t like. The author’s pace was nice and slow at the beginning, taking her time piling up Holly’s dilemmas one after the other, building up the angst, but when she got to the most important juiciest part i.e. facing the consequences of her past acts, she was very evasive, skimming to graduation in less than 20 pages. I was slightly disappointed; and that open ending was of no satisfaction for me, not knowing whether or not she and Nils will ever get back together left me very frustrated.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, I have major issues with cheating characters; nonetheless it didn’t keep me from liking Holly Hirls or enjoy reading Nothing Like You.
Favorite quote: "And how now that time had passed and sex seemed suddenly easy, I’d somehow managed to make up for any physical pain with barrelfuls of emotional pain that seemed directly proportionate to the amount of pleasure I took in the actual act. I suspected I was being
Show More
punished. Possibly by my mother. Most definitely by god."Such a sad and bittersweet coming-of-age story narrated by a sorrowful voice.
Holly comes across as a strong unbreakable girl; but inside she’s hurt, lonely and fearing what took her mother away from her will get her eventually too, as she constantly keeps on checking her breasts for lumps. It’s been six months already and she misses her just as much, she keeps all her things, listens to her favorite CDs and tries to recall every memory she has of her, so she will never disappear from her mind. But the pain sometimes can be too much to bear and she gets tired from feeling numb.
When she loses her virginity to Paul Bennett, a.k.a the star of her high school and the boyfriend of sweet perfect Saskia; her life changes drastically. She’s keeping secrets from her best friend Nils; she’s stabbing some girl in the back, but all she could feel was freedom.
"I suddenly had a secret. And it made me feel guilty, yeah, but I also felt really fantastic. I felt the opposite of dead, really what I’d been striving for, and someone suddenly wanted me in a way I hadn’t been wanted before. I didn’t even mind having to keep things to myself. I mean, I thought the whole situation was really unfortunate, but I knew that I was the one he wanted more. That if she weren’t so fragile, so unstable, he’d be with me for real. No Saskia. No secret."
Just for the record, Paul is a prick; going behind his girlfriend back and not having the guts to leave her because she’s supposedly fragile… if you fear for her and care about the girl don’t go around sleeping with other girls you little piece of shit. He was taking advantage of Holly’s state, making her believe she was more important than Saskia, while in fact, all he was doing was manipulating her and enjoying the fact that he has her at his beck and call for whenever he felt in the mood of having sex with her.
""It’s so much better with you. It’s easy. It feels right with you." I loved this. When he compared me to her. Things were easier with me. I was better than her."
Eventually, she grows tired of so many secrets, the guilt burdens her each day more when she finally gets to know Saskia and they become close friends, and with Paul blackmailing her into revealing their dirty little secret and things brightening up between her and Nils, I could smell trouble from miles away. So when shit hit the fan, everything crashed and burned in the worst possible way for poor Holly.
That’s the part I didn’t like. The author’s pace was nice and slow at the beginning, taking her time piling up Holly’s dilemmas one after the other, building up the angst, but when she got to the most important juiciest part i.e. facing the consequences of her past acts, she was very evasive, skimming to graduation in less than 20 pages. I was slightly disappointed; and that open ending was of no satisfaction for me, not knowing whether or not she and Nils will ever get back together left me very frustrated.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, I have major issues with cheating characters; nonetheless it didn’t keep me from liking Holly Hirls or enjoy reading Nothing Like You.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Dairyqueen84
Holly feels numb after her mother’s death and so she loses her virginity to Paul, whom she hardly knows. This is no tragedy at first, but Paul goes out with the willowy, pretty Saskia. At first Paul is obsessed with Holly because she cannot understand what Paul sees in her and she does not answer
Show More
his phone calls. She is flattered but then she begins to become friendly with Saskia and things get more complicated. As time goes on, Paul begins to intrude on her life more and more, showing up at her house late at night and refusing to go away until Holly lets him in. Things continue in this vein with Holly sleeping with Paul when he wants. Nils is the requisite best friend, next-door-neighbor/potential love interest where they share their lives with each other in the Shack, their backyard shed hangout, though Holly neglects to share her relationship with Paul. Holly is struggling to make meaning of her mother’s death while pretending that everything is fine to Jeff, which is what she calls her dad, and Nils. While the story line seems cliché, Strasnick makes Holly likeable and believable and her circumstances heartbreaking. The denouement is predictable but nonetheless devastating and sad but Holly somehow emerges okay. Students who like Deb Caletti, Sarah Dessen, and Laurie Halse Anderson will enjoy this book. Show Less
Awards
RITA Award (Finalist — Best First Book — 2010)
Original publication date
2009
Physical description
224 p.; 8.76 inches
ISBN
1416982647 / 9781416982647
Similar in this library
Stay by Deb Caletti