Evie is dif­fer­ent. Not just her upbringing-though that’s cer­tainly been unusual-but also her mind­set. She’s smart, inde­pen­dent, con­fi­dent, opin­ion­ated, and ready to take on a new chal­lenge: The Insti­tu­tion of School. 

It doesn’t take this home­schooled kid long to dis­cover that high school is a whole new world, and not in the way she expected. It’s also a social mine­field, and Evie finds her­self con­fronting new prob­lems at every turn, fail­ing to fol­low or even under­stand the rules, and propos­ing solu­tions that aren’t wel­come or accepted. 

Not one to sit idly by, Evie sets out to make changes. Big changes. The move­ment she starts takes off, but before she real­izes what’s hap­pen­ing, her plan spi­rals out of con­trol, forc­ing her to come to terms with a world she is only just begin­ning to com­pre­hend.

This is a light, refresh­ing story, one I enjoyed read­ing, though parts did get a bit too melo­dra­matic towards the end.

Evie was a pro­tag­o­nist I ulti­mately liked, though my pos­i­tive feel­ings towards her did lessen as the story pro­gressed. She is con­fi­dent, cheer­ful, stands up for her­self and has a strong moral com­pass, but there were times when she came across as judg­men­tal and con­de­scend­ing (in regards to her, and her mother’s, way of life, how she views the rest of the stu­dent pop­u­la­tion etc) and often she was very naive and fool­ish (her actions con­cern­ing PLUTO come to mind).

I also really liked her mum and their close rela­tion­ship (some­thing of a rar­ity in YA fic­tion), though some­times she was a bit too ditzy. I wanted her to set some bound­aries with Evie, as it was clear she could have used some guid­ance, not to men­tion expo­sure to some other points of view. What struck me was that Evie believes her­self to be well-educated and a lib­eral but she still has a very clos­eted view of the world. In that way she was a very real­is­tic teenager. Evie, once in school, imme­di­ately starts fight­ing the sys­tem, jeop­ar­dis­ing her dreams and aca­d­e­mic future and there were many times while read­ing that I didn’t nec­es­sar­ily feel she was actu­ally in the right. At other times I felt she was just argu­ing for the sake of it. Every­thing was an injus­tice (for exam­ple her obses­sion over the use of mobile phones in school). There is such a thing as choos­ing your bat­tles, and while I can applaud Evie for stand­ing up against the more seri­ous, impor­tant issues that crop up in this book, I can’t help but think that, in real­ity, she would be a very tir­ing per­son to be around! My favourite char­ac­ter was actu­ally the head­mas­ter, Dr. Fol­ger, who shows Evie there are other sides to con­sider and bet­ter ways to bring about change (and I amused myself imag­in­ing a rela­tion­ship between him and Evie’s mother).

This Girl is Dif­fer­ent focuses a lot on envi­ron­men­tal issues, healthy free-range liv­ing and so on, which ordi­nar­ily would put me off but I found it was inte­grated into the story well and didn’t feel overly preachy. Instead it pro­vided a new (for me) back­drop and gave the whole story a pretty unique, refresh­ing tone. This Girl is Dif­fer­ent also brings up some impor­tant points on sex­ism and equal­ity which was great to see and can some­times be lack­ing in YA.

There was how­ever, an inap­pro­pri­ate teacher/student rela­tion­ship story line that I don’t feel was han­dled very well. This story has a very light, easy feel to it, so sadly, it is never seri­ously explored. The dan­ger, the emo­tional manip­u­la­tion and the reper­cus­sions of this type of rela­tion­ship, is only hinted at and briefly brushed upon before being resolved or for­got­ten, which was a great shame and had the author cho­sen to look into this plot line prop­erly it would have given the story some weight and made a far more com­pelling, grown up and touch­ing read.

In the fight for what she feels is right, Evie ulti­mately takes things a step too far and learns that per­haps she doesn’t yet know every­thing and that life is not as black and white as she sees it. This is a refresh­ing coming-of-age story, and I felt John­son han­dled Evie’s tran­si­tion into con­fi­dent home-schooler to bewil­dered high-schooler, out of her depth, well. I did feel that every­thing was a bit too per­fectly (not to men­tion too eas­ily) wrapped up in the end. This Girl is Dif­fer­ent is a fun read, not to be taken too seri­ously. There were a few too many clichés and an overly cheesy romance but it was nice to see a pretty healthy, nor­mal teenage rela­tion­ship for once with no life or death sit­u­a­tions attached. I really enjoyed This Girl Is Dif­fer­ent until about 2/3rd of the way through, then some major drama started and every­one went a lit­tle too insane for me.

Not a favourite, but def­i­nitely, as the time title sug­gests, some­thing a bit different.

*Many thanks to Peachtree Pub­lish­ers and Net­Gal­ley for mak­ing this ebook available*