Holly has just had a one night stand with Paul, a popular guy at her high school with a long-term girlfriend. Holly doesn't really know why she did it, except that her mom recently died of cancer and her feelings are all sort of numb. Unbelievably Paul persues her and convinces her to have a secret sexual relationship. That's great and all, but then she makes friends with Saskia (Paul's g/f) and also there's that neighbor boy Nils.... The harder she tries to end it with Paul, the harder he tries to change her mind, and the longer it goes on, the greater the chances are for major disaster!

I really really liked this book in a 'my heart hurt' kind of way. I felt bad for Holly even though what she was doing was wrong. I really wanted everything to work out for her, but I guess a lesson had to be learned there. I still wish it would've ended a with a little more resolution.

I thought the subject matter was pretty great. How many books tackle the subject of casual teen sex/friends with benefits in a realistic way? This one did an awesome job showing that sometimes people do bad things because they can't help themselves. A lot of people use sex as a need for comfort and love, but sex doesn't always equal love and that's a lesson a lot of young girls learn the hard way (like Holly). I know losing her mother wasn't an excuse for what she did, but I didn't see her as a villian. She was letting herself get talked into something because she wanted someone to care about her. I just felt like I could understand her so much. What she did to Nils was really shitty, but he should've been a better friend to her before and after :(

I also thought the way this book was written was cool. Some chapters would be only a page long, yet they were still incredibly powerful. It was so minimalist or something, but it worked!


"You are very loved. You need to work harder at loving yourself."
~Amazing quote... and so true!

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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 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. ( )

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 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. ( )

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, 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. ( )

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 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. ( )