Tender

By: Eve Ainsworth
Location: FIC AIN
Genre: Youth Mental Health

Touching on mental health, family, friendship and the pressures that teenage carers face, as author Cat Clarke says, TENDER is "a compassionate, compelling and unflinching novel". 

Marty and Daisy spend their lives pretending. Marty pretends his mum's grip on reality isn't slipping by the day. Daisy pretends her parents aren't exhausting themselves while they look after her incurably ill brother. They both pretend they're fine. But the thing about pretending is, at some point, it has to stop. And then what?

"Tender is full of moments that made me gasp, made me cry but also made my heart lighten with hope. Seeing the group for Young Carers being represented as such a positive safe haven for them to go was really positive and I loved the range of people that were shown to be carers. I absolutely could not put this book down once I had started it. It is a compelling and emotional read that I would love to spread far and wide. Stories like this are important because more often than not they are forgotten.

I work with plenty of people who are young carers and they honestly astound me every day. I don’t think they are a group who get anywhere near enough praise and thought as others do and these young people are living in varied situations but have one thing in common: they have to be the adult in some capacity. I am so thankful to Eve Ainsworth for writing a book that focuses on this particular group of young people – this is definitely a book I recommend for teachers, anyone who works with young people/carers, school libraries and so on." Goodreads review