"How to Be Normal" is marketed like, oh sweet, homeschooled girl goes to high school for the first time in Year 12, awkward hijinks ensue. And yes, technically that is happening. Astrid is seventeen, stepping into a classroom for the first time after a lifetime of being homeschooled by her mum under her dad’s extremely rigid, tightly controlled regime.

But this is not a quirky fish out of water comedy. This is a girl trying to learn how to breathe in a house where the air is monitored.

Her father’s coercive control is the kind that makes you doubt your own memory. Nothing looks dramatic from the outside. No bruises. No screaming neighbors calling the cops. Just rules. Expectations. Tone shifts. The constant sense that one wrong move will tip the entire house sideways. Crawford captures that atmosphere of fear so well it feels like a horror novel without a single ghost. The house is “ordinary.” That’s the horror.

And then Astrid goes to school. Which, frankly, is already its own social war zone. Watching her try to make friends while carrying this invisible weight is both painful and painfully accurate. She edits herself constantly. Lies to protect her dad’s image. Shrinks her personality to avoid scrutiny. There’s this heartbreaking thread of her thinking she might just be fundamentally broken because she’s learned how to rearrange herself into whatever shape feels safest. That line about arranging herself in too many ways? Yeah. That one lingers.

I really appreciated how the book handles her sexuality too. It’s not some glitter cannon moment of instant clarity. It’s tentative. Curious. A little awkward. There’s queer representation that feels grounded in an Australian high school setting, including non binary and pan identities woven naturally into the friend group. It’s messy in a way that feels honest rather than performative, which I loved. Let teenagers be confused and figuring it out. That’s the whole point.

Also, the tension in this book? Wild. A slammed cupboard has the same energy as a jump scare in "Hereditary." A missed call feels catastrophic. Every small domestic interaction is loaded. Crawford does this thing where even “normal” moments feel like they’re teetering on the edge of disaster. It’s exhausting to read in a very intentional way, because that’s what living in coercive control does. It drains you.

The ending and the aftermath felt a little compressed. There’s a lot of build up around the idea of leaving, the danger of leaving, the brother Nick having already escaped, and when things finally shift, I wanted more time in the rubble. More mess. More fallout. I was ready to sit in the uncomfortable process of rebuilding. Instead, it wraps a bit quicker than my emotionally nosy heart wanted.

There were also moments where the writing style leaned slightly abstract or on the nose. Sometimes that worked beautifully with the themes. Other times I found myself rereading a paragraph like, wait, are we being metaphorical or literal right now? It didn’t ruin the experience, but it occasionally pulled me out of the flow.

Still. This is a powerful debut. It tackles emotional abuse and coercive control in a way that feels necessary, especially in a YA space where that kind of violence can be minimized because it’s not physical. The book makes it clear that control is control, fear is fear, and the damage is real even when it’s invisible.

By the end, I just wanted Astrid to have a room with a lock that no one else controls. That’s it. That’s the bar. Freedom. Space. The right to decide who she is without someone else rewriting the script.

Three and a half stars. Messy, important, tense as hell, and emotionally sharp.

Whodunity Award: For Making a Closed Door More Terrifying Than a Body on the Floor

And a chaotic little thank you to Publisher Spotlight and NetGalley for the ARC. You handed me this “normal” looking book and it emotionally body slammed me in the quietest way possible. I will never look at a slammed cupboard the same again. Appreciate you for feeding my feelings.