Born Scared

by Kevin Brooks

The much anticipated follow-up title from the multi-award winning author of The Bunker Diary, recipient of the 2014 Carnegie Medal for an outstanding book for young adults.

Elliot is terrified of almost everything.

From the moment he was born, his life has been governed by acute fear. The only thing that keeps his terrors in check are the pills that he takes every day.

It's Christmas Eve, there's a snowstorm and Elliot's medication is almost gone. His mum nips out to collect his prescription. She'll only be 10 minutes – but shen she doesn't come back, Elliot must face his fears and try to find her. She should only be 400 metres away. It might as well be 400 miles…

Born Scared joins the ranks of Jennifer Niven's All the Bright Places, Ned Vizzini's It's Kind of A Funny Story, and Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why as an example of teen fiction offering a frank and intelligent portrait of mental illness.

Kevin Brooks was born in 1959.

His first novel, Martyn Pig, was shortlisted for a 2002 Carnegie Medal and won the 2003 Branford Boase Award. His second novel, Lucas, won the 2004 North East Book Award. In 2014 his novel The Bunker Diary was awarded the CILIP Carnegie Medal.

Kevin lives in North Yorkshire.

• ISBN13: 9781780316857
• Publish Date: 8 September 2016
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Egmont UK Ltd
• Imprint: Electric Monkey
• Format: eBook (EPUB)
• Pages: 256
• Language: English
• URL: http://harpercollins.co.uk

Reviews

[readingwithwrin]

Elliot is such a sweet character that I wanted to protect at all costs.

Elliot is afraid of everything to the point that at 13-years-old is now a shut-in and hardly leaves his room and is fully reliant on the medicine his doctor has prescribed him. While the medicine isn't enough to fully help him, it is enough that it keeps him from constantly spiraling. When it's time to refill his prescription on Christmas Eve the pharmacy messes up, and with several other mishaps having happened, his mom has now gone out to get the medicine leaving him alone with only a few pills left that he is supposed to take every few hours. As time runs out and his mom is still nowhere in sight, he decides that he needs to go out and find her and his medicine.

Elliot is such a special character to me, he was born prematurely and lost a sibling all in a very short amount of time in his young life. These events appear to have left their mark on him in a way of severe anxiety that is unexplainable by doctors it seems. This has left him in a really rough space, with seemingly no real answers as on the medicine has helped a little. The bravery he ends up showing when he feels like his mom is in danger is truly heartwarming, and really shows how much he truly does understand about his fear and anxiety for being so young.

Overall I really liked this book. I liked seeing things from Elliot's perspective as well as from the perspective of another character that had something to do with his mom. These two perspectives ended up tying things together and really made the story more enjoyable.
The bravery and the reality of Elliot's anxiety and how willing he was to do things for the fear of his mom and the need for his medicine is a real thing that so many people go through. I loved that this was something talked about in a Middle-grade novel and it's not something that was just swept under the rug. We need more book that actually show the realities of Anxiety and how it can affect people to make it more normalized and to help make people feel less alone. This book has the potential to do that and I can't wait to see what middle schoolers think of it!