REVIEW: No Ordinary Love Song by Alison Prince

Cal hates: What humans are doing to the planet - and his dad, most of the time. Cal likes: Music - and Kerry from Australia, who's so beautiful it hurts.  But when liking turns to love, everything changes...

No Ordinary Love Song revolves around sixteen-year-old Callum McCasky and how he experiences first love in the summer with a girl who has just arrived with her family on the Scottish island where he lives. It is like a breath of fresh air for him: away from his eccentric family and time for him to forget that humans are destroying the earth. But life at home and family troubles are the least of his worries when Kerry tells him that she is pregnant...

Callum struggles through school and his parents and teachers pester him to make more of an effort so that he can go to university even though he enjoys and wants to pursue music. Life at home isn't any better for him and I felt very sorry for him when both his parents, embarrassingly, started affairs. At the start of the book he does not have a good relationship with his parents - especially his father, who is portrayed as the alpha-male - but over the course of events the family become much closer and begin to realise what they had missed before. Callum also matures as a person, from an orange-haired sixteen-year-old boy to a young adult who takes responsibility for his actions.

At first, I didn't really enjoy this book but I must admit that it gets better towards the middle. It was interesting to read a love story from a boy's point of view because most books like this would be written from the girl's. I particularly enjoyed reading about the way he dealt with Kerry's pregnancy and how he was so responsible and stuck by her through everything. He was successfully portrayed as a typical moody teenager but his views of the world and human beings were quite complex and mature from the start, which gave the book a unique voice. Some of the book is also written from his mum Elaine's point of view and this certainly adds a more realistic touch to the overall story because she is an 'outsider' to Callum and Kerry's relationship. The tone of the whole story varies from witty to serious and in places I appreciated Prince's unique style of writing.  It addresses many different issues like first love, teenage pregnancy, breakdown of families and global warming.  I give this 4/5 and would recommend it to those over the age of 13.

Thank you to Luisa for sending me this book to review for Chicklish.  To see the review on the Chicklish website click HERE.