Toxic

Pages: 400

Publisher: UCLAN Publishing

Released: 7th of July 2022 

Llewella has straight-A grades, a lead in the school play, a prefect badge, a successful blog and a comfortable life. Despite this, she feels like a brown, chubby square peg at a school full of thin, white girls. She's never had a best friend. Could the new student at sixth form - glamorous, streetwise Aretha - be the one? Llewella and Aretha get tight, quick. 

Before long, Llewella is following a diet Aretha has designed for her and has abandoned her own passions to dive headfirst into Aretha's world. She's determined to be the most loyal, greatest friend she can be, even when Aretha says and does things which make her feel the opposite of great. Even when the anxiety disorder she thought was cured starts to re-emerge. Isn't that how friendships work?

Trigger Warnings: Anxiety, Diet Culture, toxic friendship

What I Have to Say 

This was a book that was easy to read and easy to get in with. Llewella was a character who was really likeable and I enjoyed reading her thoughts. For someone who knew what was coming, Aretha was easy to hate, but I could also see what Llewella saw in her so the friendship didn't see unrealistic at all, just toxic. 

There were trigger warnings at the start were useful, but it was also obvious that the author had put a lot of thought into how to make the book as sensitive to triggers as possible. As someone who is sometimes sensitive to eating disorder triggers and diet culture, I didn't find the book triggering at all. I really appreciated the thought that had been put into it. Of course that's not to say that the book wouldn't trigger someone else, so please check the warnings, both on this post and in the front of the book before reading. 

I really thought this book was just spectacularly well done. I could really see where the relationship was heading and I was worried for what Llewella would have left at the end of it. Well worth the read. 

My thanks go to UCLAN and Netgalley for providing me with this copy for review.