Ellie Pillai is Brown

Product Information

This book looks at the challenges life throws us, how to be OK with being yourself, and how to show love to those that matter in your life. trials and tribulations at school, with family, friends and potential love interests, interspersed with musical interludes. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. Luckily for me, this was written closer to the style of my favourite author Alice Oseman, with diverse / Queer characters and a protagonist I really connected with.

Now Mrs Aachara’s leading the class and it seems she’s spotted something in Ellie’s ‘performance’ that even she doesn’t know is present. Not only is it GCSE year, but it’s the year when the lie of drama lessons might be discovered by Ellie’s mother and father.With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics. A fresh, funny, feel-good story and a powerful exploration of identity, friendship and family with music threaded all the way through. Revolves mostly on friendship, family conflicts, bit on sexuality and those emotional hurdles and mental crisis of finding and exploring one's identify, the plot was a bit cliché to me yet quite interesting as it goes. And sadly only like one of those topics are given the time to develop, instead the rest feel rushed or just there to be a cliche.

The characters are all so multi dimensional and layered that again, no one felt like a stereotype or even like a character because they just felt like people you could know for real, which again was reminiscent of John Hughes (for the record, he is my favourite director/producer of all time, so this is a Very Big Compliment in case it is construed in a different way). The twist towards the end completely threw me, I hadn’t expected it at all which I loved, and I marvel at how well Pillainayagam celebrates so many elements of identity. I was at my last school for 4 years and we had ********* book fairs every term – and every term, I was disappointed by the narrow range of books.

The way it did turn out, though, was for the record the way I wanted it to be, and I’ve heard there’s going to be a sequel so I will absolutely be reading that so I can see some more of these characters.