Does Snogging Count as Exercise?

Holly Stockwell is 14 – academic, bookish, deeply allergic to physical exercise and an outcast in a hyperactive, sports-mad family. Her best friend Poppy comes equipped with a gorgeous elder brother, Luke, and it is on him that Holly focuses her romantic daydreams. The book breathlessly canters through a number of teenage preoccupations and concerns, its light-hearted tone softening the very real worries beneath – loss of friends, alienation from family, failure to make successful connections with the opposite sex.

There are shades of the Georgia Nicolson books here but Holly’s family is less sharply drawn and her conversations with her friends more serious. These qualities give the book a thoughtful tenor and the entirely satisfactory happy ending reassures and cheers. Does Snogging Count as Exercise? will entertain and inform young teenage girls in an absorbing and supportive way.