Two years ago, Lilah’s older brother, Jay, ran away after she caught him tak­ing drugs. Since then, no one’s heard from him or knows where he is. Eaten up with guilt and worry, with her par­ents not cop­ing well and her now ex-best friend dat­ing the boy she likes, Lilah’s strug­gling to keep her anger until con­trol again. Sud­denly Jay comes home after sleep­ing rough on the streets, but it’s not quite a happy reunion she always imag­ined it would be.

Lilah May used to be angry. VERY angry. But not any more. She’s got her tem­per — and her life — back under con­trol. Or has she? Things with her best friend, Bindi, are going from bad to worse. The where­abouts of her brother Jay is still a mys­tery. And gor­geous Adam Carter is still out of reach. Groo! Can Lilah sort out her fam­ily, her friend­ship and her love life? Or is her anger about to reach all new levels?

Lilah May’s Manic Days is a very ‘read­able’ story. Lilah’s voice is fresh, ener­getic and real­is­ti­cally young, and I was quickly drawn into her life, despite not hav­ing read the first book of this series.

Lilah is your typ­i­cal teenager. She has tantrums, can be incred­i­bly self-absorbed, she doesn’t always treat her best friend (sorry, ex-best friend) very well and is amus­ingly over dra­matic on the sub­ject, ‘my true love ran off with my true friend’. Every­thing is a big deal. But she’s such an engag­ing char­ac­ter, and she han­dles the dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion with her brother and Spud with matu­rity (for the most part), and some­times with more wis­dom, than her parents.

I par­tic­u­larly loved the scenes between Jay and Lilah, who you sense were once very close. Brother and sis­ter are now strangers and there’s a lot of unre­solved hurt and anger between them, espe­cially on Lilah’s part. For a lot of the book, Lilah strug­gles with tip­toe­ing around her brother for fear of loos­ing him again, per­haps for­ever, and say­ing what she really feels. When things finally come to a head between them I was inwardly cheer­ing Lilah on every step of the way.

The sub­plot with Bindi and Adam held less inter­est for me, prob­a­bly because the fam­ily dynamic was so much more inter­est­ing and any scenes between Adam and Lilah all took place (I pre­sume) in the pre­vi­ous book. I did, how­ever, quite like Bindi, what lit­tle we see of her; as she tells Lilah a few home truths about her own behaviour.

This was a quick read that I enjoyed far more than I expected to and a great book for kids and young teenagers. It deals with some edgy sub­jects in an hon­est, open way and I loved read­ing a children’s book where the par­ents are devel­oped char­ac­ters in their own right and actively involved in the story and their kid’s lives. Lilah is fif­teen in this book, but I would rec­om­mend this one for ages eleven upwards. Def­i­nitely worth reading!