It's All Your Fault

by Paul Rudnick

[readingwithwrin]

"Before this weekend I'd had an idea of myself, or at least a goal, of the sort of person I'd wanted to be. I'd be a Girl Scout crossed with a nun and a headmistress, with a collection of Good Conduct medals and Headed for Sainthood trophies, all of which I'd be too modest to accept. I'd go to Parsippany Tech and get perfect grades and I'd not only do my family's taxes, I'd travel to underprivileged countries as a member of Accountants Without Borders. I'd be exactly what Heller said I was: a priss-pot in granny panties. I'd spend my entire life keeping my head down and behaving myself and trying desperately to never secretly congratulate myself on being so perfect, because the second I did that, the second I tried to be happy, or proud of myself, or weird, or different, that was when my own personnal Cancer Kings which were my Anxiety Monster and Guilt Goblin would come roaring out of their subterranean caves, looking for me and cackling. "

See reviews first on my blog






Caitlin is a good Christian girl, she is a Singleberry meaning her and her 8 siblings are all home-schooled and all sing together as a family. On top of this though Caitlin has anxiety, and we don’t really see how bad it is or how long it’s been going on until a ways into the book.
Then we have Heller who is Caitlin’s cousin who is now a teenage star. The only problem is that Heller has gone off the deep end with drinking, drugs, etc. and now it appears that Heller’s mother is asking Caitlin to babysit Heller for the weekend in order to make sure she doesn’t go off the deep end and ruin in big new movie and chance at starting over.
Seems simple enough… That is until you realize that these two girls have a very big problem with each other that happened when they were younger and caused them to stop talking to one another.
After the girls have spent some time together and Caitlin has seen Heller’s world and all that comes with it. She starts to see why Heller did turn to those things and even though she didn’t think they were right she saw why Heller did it and realized how alone she really had been.
And then craziness happens with Sophie the girl who has cancer and that Heller is supposed to spend the day with. While the girls do end up spending the day together it is not how they thought it would be at all, or one that the parent’s wanted to happen…
But it was a good thing it happened because along the way we got to see Caitlin’s anxiety and some of her triggers and we got to see Heller try to fix it and make Caitlin feel okay… which was nice except for Caitlin just completely letting her self-lose control for the first time ever. This was very entertaining to read about, but was also rather sad because it made you realize how anxious she was all the time.

I really ended up loving this book, it talked about some really big issues, but dealt with them along with humor. I was smiling and cracking up all throughout this book. I would highly recommend you read this if you want a quick, fun read that does deal with anxiety in a very real way.



"All it had taken was a baby asprin, swallowed under the false pretenses, to turn me into a wild, lawless, deranged creature--into Heller. We need to turn Heller into me."