An acerbic and heartwarming story about, at the core of it all, being twentysomething and lonely and free in a big city. This was sharply witty and sadly funny by turns, incredibly well written, and the characters may not have been likable but they felt very real. London grunge, the complexity of families, the shades of finding and leaving people and places and seasons in your life - this book has it all. An unexpected pleasure to read.

A compelling story of queer discovery and growing up. I'm always equal parts excited and nervous when I find a book with bisexual rep, waiting for the tokenism to start but whilst this book explores a young women dating multiple people, it's done in a way that isn't stereotyping and instead uses these different relationships to represent a journey of the different people she could be, the confusion and chaos she feels at trying to figure herself out. It's told in such a conversational, witty writing style that is so easy to read. Compelling, painfully real and beautifully done.

This was an engaging story that reads compulsively. Our protagonist, Ada, is an Australian living in London, with her best friend Mel.
Ada meets Sadie and Stuart at roughly the same time, and pursues romances with both of them (I was 100% team Sadie).
Ada is chaotic, in debt and prone to making very bad decisions, but she's confident and a fun lead character.
Her sister had a baby, and part of the book is set in America, where Ada has travelled to be with her sister and her parents. This section was a real highlight of the book.
There were also some amazing food descriptions!
Each chapter is interspersed with a text conversation which was also a fun detail.
An enjoyable read, even if Ada makes decision that will make you hold your head in your hands.

Wry, sharp and effortlessly funny, Go Lightly is a spiky bisexual love story that captures the highs and lows of millennial life with charm and insight.

Ada, a twenty six year old Australian living in London, drifts between cabaret gigs and temp jobs, thriving on late nights, big stories and the thrill of new connections. She falls for Sadie and Stuart at the same time and sees no reason not to pursue them both.

As real life creeps in with its bills, family obligations and the consequences of her choices, Ada is pushed to confront what she really wants and whether she can keep living entirely on her own terms. She is flawed, impulsive and full of main character energy, yet her self awareness and humour make her easy to root for even when her decisions are questionable.

Brydie Lee-Kennedy’s prose is warm, smart and vividly observed, creating a celebration of freedom, sexuality and friendship while also exploring the uncertainty that comes with growing up.

Read more at The Secret Book Review.

Happy publication day to "Go Lightly" by Brydie Lee-Kennedy and many thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury for providing an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I have conflicting feelings about this book, starting with the fact that nothing really happens or becomes interesting until about 30-35% of the way in. I do feel that a lot of people would probably give up while reading that first third, rather than wait for it to become good. It does become good around the halfway mark. My reading speed essentially doubled and I read the second half of the book over 3 days.

At first I felt like none of the characters were likeable, and I understand that this is intentional at least in the case of the main character Ada, but the risk with having a cast of fully unlikeable characters is that you just go through it thinking "why?". Particularly the first few messages that Stuart exchanges with Ada read so creepy and spammy that you really wondered why Ada ever gave him the time of day.

It is really hard to read through someone's murky feelings about people because being that they are an unreliable narrator as well you don't really know if you should believe what they tell you they are feeling.

When Ada travels to Florida to be reunited with her family I think that was the most enjoyable part, reading about the family dynamic and that slice of life aspect that focuses on what she was cooking for them every evening. Food was so prominent in this book and I loved it. However there is a real sense of underwhelm that the sister who Ada essentially blames for shaping so many different parts of her life is not really the villain that Ada described but is most of the time a neutral character who just happens to take up a lot of space in Ada's head. This to me was essential to understanding the character of Ada and how much she projects on other people, making her a struggling actor did go very well with the kind of personality that she is shown to have.

I was very pleased that this never turned out to be a "you have to pick a side" novel and that all characters were quite open to having loosely defined romantic relationships, in stark contrast with what happens to Mel at the end of the book. Mel is shown to be fully onboard the relationship escalator and completely out of the blue, similar to the character of Gabby, Ada's sister. I do wonder if this juxtaposition between straight characters and queer character was intentional. I hope it was.

A stylish, chaotic ride..fun, but a little uneven.

Go Lightly has sharp writing and plenty of messy charm, like a friend who tells great stories but sometimes forgets the point. Brydie Lee Kennedy definitely has a voice that stands out. Honest, raw, and sometimes funny in a real way. I appreciated the moments where the main character opened up emotionally, and some of the reflections on relationships, identity, and growing up really hit home.

That said, the story didn't always hold together for me. It felt a bit scattered at times, and I had trouble staying engaged in certain parts.

Overall, I didn't love it but also didn't dislike it either. It had some great moments, and I am glad that I read it, even if it didn't fully click with me.

Ada is our main character and we follow her as she explores the world of her own thoughts and feelings. and Ada seems to feel a whole lot. she is trying to be fun, out there, go explore. but the fun can sometimes feel like chaos. this isn't helped when she finds herself wanting to date two people. and why not? she has Sadie who makes her feel the fizz and pop and so their time seems grand. and also there is a time limit to their time together because Sadie will be going to her home country soon. so then there is also a really nice guy who saw her in one of her acting gigs and is very sweet on her. what could go wrong?
it feels to me like Ada has had some big feelings in life that might need help working through for example an awful lot that is underlying between her around her sister. there seems to be a tension which i never felt was explored to it max potential. and managing to balance that and the romance felt like they both couldn't compete for the top slot.
but you feel for Ada. she is finding her way in a world that she doesn't ever seem to find easy. her relationships with this man and woman who at first dont know about each other makes for more stress.
this book fits its title. as Ada to me is not flawed but shes also a woman living outside the norms of what boxes we so often want to place people in and Brydie observes her character so well and then writes it so we can imagine this young woman in our own mind. i have a picture of Ada going through this book that is so vivid and full of colours. and i was rooting or so much good things to come her way. and at some points for her to just feel settled in her own skin. this world doesn't make that easy to do sometimes.

Party girl and bi-sexual Ada is torn between 2 loves. A story of friendship .love and community . Will either relationship last?

Go Lightly is a novel about a bisexual Australian woman living in London who finds herself caught between two people. Ada is an actor who loves a fun time, so when she meets Sadie at Edinburgh Fringe and then Stuart messages her having seen her perform there, it seems she has opportunities abound. Even her estranged sister's immanent giving birth can't put her down. But as Ada tries to balance the things in her life and the people she is in these different situations, sometimes the chaos is too much for her.

I was drawn to this book as a queer version of the 'chaotic young woman has a messy life' genre, and I was hoping for something fun but also delving deep in character. Unfortunately, the best bits of this book weren't the romance or Ada's development (or lack thereof), and those parts take up the majority of it. Ada's family situation and some of her quirks when she was growing up were much more interesting, and the section of the book set in Florida as she visits her sister who has just given birth was the best part, with tension lingering underneath that never really gets delved into enough. It felt almost like a separate novella stuck in the middle which lacked a real conclusion or progression once that bit was over.

The novel feels caught between being a feel good contemporary light romance and being more like a Sally Rooney novel, which ends up making it not really work as either, at least not for me. Both of her love interests are pretty forgettable and Ada herself is mostly a bundle of meant-to-be-relatable things who never really gets either character development or particularly purposeful non-development. Ada's position as a flawed-but-meant-to-be-relatable protagonist also means there's some weird comments in the book that immediately put me off, like calling someone "entirely asexual" not as their orientation but just as Ada's vibe about them, or a scene about discussing if it is problematic or not to still watch Harry Potter films without actually mentioning why or engaging with what it means as a queer person to discuss that.

Overall, this book was fine as a light read, but it just didn't quite work for me. I appreciate it being a queer version of the 'young woman is a mess' novel, as from my perspective a lot of those feel aggressively straight even when the book wants the protagonist to have the vibe of being bisexual without ever actually being bi or using the term. However, I'd prefer Go Lightly if it actually went a bit less lightly, and delved into some of the weirder or tense elements of the narrative that don't really go anywhere, like Ada's relationship with her sister.

So, I would sum up the world of the MC, Ada, as such: Ada observes a lot of the world insightfully, though she bulldozes her way through it, and feels way too much about it all. If I'm exhausted by her, she is even more exhausted by herself.

Ada is a 20-something Australian expat living in London, trying to break into the acting world. She hooks up with Perth-based Sadie on the last night of the Edinburgh Fringe and somehow ends up with her as a houseguest for the coming months. Their connection is hot but not exactly romantic. But that's ok, because there's this sweet guy in Liverpool who saw Ada in her play and now thinks he's in love with her. She doesn't need to tell Sadie, who is leaving soon, does she?

This book all felt strikingly familiar to me as a queer, non-monogamous Australian who has been based out of London for the past 20 years. I feel like this was a beautifully observed story about what it feels like to live outside the norm, where there's rarely a social script to follow. I usually don't like books that are partly told through transcripts of messaged conversations, but in this case, it amused me.

I struggled quite a bit to get into this book, but once it got going I found it an enjoyable read. I don't think it will be for everyone though, the writing style is not my favourite and does make the book drag a bit.

Go Lightly follows free-spirited, chaotic Ada, who falls for Sadie and Stuart at the same time. It's a very internal book, mostly interested in how Ada thinks and feels and responds to things in the moment, and the stream of consciousness style definitely achieves a very vivid sense of her shifting wants and priorities and thoughts as she flits between wanting Sadie and wanting Stuart.

There was a lot to like about this book - great internal observation, sharply drawn main character - but it just didn't quite hit for me. There was so much promise in terms of issues set up to explore, particularly around her sister and family, and Ada's childhood need to 'perform' facial expressions to ensure people knew how she felt and subsequent fear that she was a psychopath, but none of it was ever really explored in any depth. The story as a whole was much more about the two romantic relationships, and unfortunately I didn't find I ever got to know Sadie enough for this to really propel me through the book (though I had a read on Stuart from first DM slide and was sadly vindicated, as I knew I would be - we've all had a Stuart in our lives).

My strong feeling is that I'm just not quite the audience for this book - I was drawn by the Dolly Alderton comparison, but that didn't ring true for me in the reading, All that said, this could be a great read for fans of Imogen Crimp's A Very Nice Girl and maybe Sally Rooney's early work. Readers who want to live in a single character's head with all the 'slice of life' that brings will probably enjoy this one.