Review: Stepping Up

Stepping Up by Sarah Turner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Beth is a teenager trapped in a thirty-one year old's body. She still lives at home with her parents, gets wasted during the week, flits from one dead-end job to another, can't be relied upon for anything, and is prone to calling in fake sick to work after a boozy night in the pub with her best mate Jory. March 15th is just such a day, hungover and with a car that won't start Beth calls in sick and then switches her phone off so she doesn't have to speak to her boss while she deletes all the damning evidence of the previous night's 'high jinks' from social media.

But the unthinkable has happened, Beth's older sister Emmy and her husband have been involved in a terrible car accident on the M5 motorway, her brother-in-law is dead and her sister is in a coma, their wills stated that Beth was to be the guardian of their fourteen year old daughter Polly and four year old son Ted. How can a woman who can't cook, doesn't know how to use a washing machine, and can't get herself out of bed on time for work, expect to look after two heartbroken children? Sometimes it's the really hard things that make you a grown-up.

I was ruminating about this book last night and thinking how some feelings/experiences, like first love, transcend age, it doesn't matter if you are thirteen or eighty reading about first love (especially first heartbreak) really gets you in the feels. Some things however, become less relatable as we get older. So basically I found the concept of a thirty-one year old woman being so completely useless and behaving like a teenager really irritating/off-putting, and I couldn't understand why Jory (who is a responsible adult with his own home and a career as a teacher) still likes Beth or even wants to hang out with her when she gets stupid drunk.

However, once I got over the first few chapters I really got interested in the book, how Beth steps up for Polly and Ted (in her own way) and grows into an adult. I think one of the things I liked was that the journey was long with lots of set-backs, there was no eureka moment halfway through where Beth starts batch-cooking food for the freezer or making exquisite fancy dress costumes for Ted, it's all gradual and more believable. My only gripe is that it is all too predictable, of course we know Beth is going to step up in the end, it's in the title, etc, etc.

I would be interested in reading other books by this author.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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