Nina is not OK: Not sure this book is either

What is this about?: You know, I can’t tell for sure. It’s both about her alcoholism and her assault.

What else is this about?: Everything above kind of covers it.

Stars: 3

Blurb: Nina does not have a drinking problem. She likes a drink, sure. But what 17-year-old doesn’t?

Nina’s mum isn’t so sure. But she’s busy with her new husband and five year old Katie. And Nina’s almost an adult after all.

And if Nina sometimes wakes up with little memory of what happened the night before , then her friends are all too happy to fill in the blanks. Nina’s drunken exploits are the stuff of college legend.

But then one dark Sunday morning, even her friends can’t help piece together Saturday night. All Nina feels is a deep sense of shame, that something very bad has happened to her…

A dark, funny – sometimes shocking – coming of age novel from one of the UK’s leading comedians. NINA IS NOT O.K. will appeal to fans of Caitlin Moran and Lena Dunham.

Spoiler warning, because parts Nina is not Ok aggravated me so much and I need to vent. 

Nina is 17 years old, going on 12 and wants to believe she’s an adult.

When I finished the book, that is the image of Nina that came to mind, but I am aware this is a book about an alcoholic so my interpretations of certain scenes might actually be way off the mark because those scenes could all be exactly what an alcoholic goes through.

Please keep this in mind when you read this review. So, let’s get into it.

I’m hard pressed to think why this blurb would call this book a coming-of-age story. Those are important stories in and of themselves, but I couldn’t reconcile alcoholism and rape as simply coming of age, because those are things a person will deal with for the rest of their life. I mean, PTSD could be a consequence of rape, couldn’t it? And alcoholism is something an alcoholic will battle for the rest of their lives too. So, why use rape and alcoholism to drive a story that is a coming-of-age story and showing how a teen becomes an adult?

This is one of the reasons I think this book doesn’t know what it wants to be about. Given that it’s published in 2016, I’m even more puzzled at why the book blurb is so tame, while trying to deal with important issues women are dealing with right now.

When the book opens, Nina is already an alcoholic, so we don’t know any other state of being for her. We’re plopped down at the beginning of the end in a way, that is, the beginning of her spiral downward. We don’t know who she was before she was an alcoholic and we don’t know enough about how she got this way. There are hints through the book of this before Nina, but they’re namely through her obsessing about her ex and his new girlfriend while she’s drunk.

There are also hints about the influences behind her alcoholism – a drunken father, feeling she’s lost her mother to her new step-father and resenting him, and said break-up of course — but they’re not enough. It made me think that the story was going to deal with the rape and her dealing with it, and how it affected her drinking, was the focus of this book, but it’s not.

To say she’s emotionally fragile is an understatement. And Nina knows it – she knows she’s an alcoholic, she knows she’s out of control and she can’t help herself, and that sort of thing I absolutely can appreciate  in this book about an alcoholic.

However, this cold, self-absorbed and childish girl is all we know about Nina and that makes it hard to empathise with her. And I needed to be able to empathise with her – I needed to know more about what she was, and how and why she began on this path to be right there cheering her on when she succeeded and worrying for her when she failed.

Perhaps the author wanted the book to be about her recovering from being an alcoholic, and it’s about her pulling herself out of her alcoholism and on one level, I respect that… but then why include a rape in the story? Even though it’s tied to her alcoholism, it brings an element into the story that deserved more attention than it got in the book.

The first and second thirds focus on the Nina’s alcoholism, with a mention of the rape that haunts her and I expected more of a focus on the rape and consent issues in those parts. But there just wasn’t enough for me. While, the last third focuses on wrapping up the rape storyline — with a hell of a lot of telling.  Yeah. Multiple victims, cops and so much happens in that third, but it’s all just telling. 

I didn’t feel like we experienced Nina dealing with those situations like we should have and there was a missed potential there, especially as the blurb suggests that the rape is a focus of the book — to me, her alcoholism and the its consequences were more of a focus. I can’t help but wonder how this book would have been had the book, for instance, elaborated on her relationships, the ones that fractured because of her drinking — especially, her step-father.  There are far-reaching consequences for Nina, her family and her friends and they’re just all wrapped up neatly in a bow, instead of explored properly through the book.

In fact, her mother and Alan, her step-father, bear the brunt of her in an alcoholic stupor and Nina is a brat to her mother at every turn and barely tolerates Alan when she’s sober. I came away thinking how ugly this character is inside and wondered is this who Nina is? Or is this what the alcohol makes her? I couldn’t really tell, because the book never told me about before Nina. And for most of the book it feels a little like the author needed to make her mother and Alan flat in order to make Nina’s feelings resonate with the reader.

Also, there’s no humour in her constant bitching. I suspect the humour was in her interaction with her friends, but that was just flat. Humour isn’t snark.

In general, I don’t think this book knows what it’s supposed to be – a look at young woman’s descent into alcoholism or a commentary about consent issues, as the blurb hints at. Looking at those two topics, I feel so conflicted about this book – it’s so uneven.

I wanted to like this, I recced this ages ago and have been excited about it since then. Overall, Nina is Not Ok is an ambitious but uneven read. Am I being too hard — I feel certain plot points need to be a focus of a book — like rape and alcoholism — without anything else to detract from these issues. There was a story in a teenager recovering from her alcoholism and the effects of it on her family and friends. What books deal with this better?