It’s day one of GeekDis, and I am so happy to be joining the blog tour for Ask the Girl by Kim Bartosch, hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Ask the Girl is a book that has a lot of disability representation in it, including mental health representation and chronic illness representation. While Kim Bartosch is not disabled herself, her son is autistic, and her sister has bipolar disorder, and she is an advocate for disability awareness.

Please take the time to check out the other people who are taking part in the blog tour!

• BookHounds YA
• GryffindorBookishNerd
• Ya Books Central
• Beers Books Boos
• @books_carry_dreams
• Nagma | TakeALookAtMyBookshelf
• Laurenreads._
• @jacleomik33
• @just_another_mother_with_books

Ask The Girl by Kim Bartosch
Published by Woodhall Press
Age Group: Young Adult
Format: Fiction
Genres and Categories: Chronic Illness, Medical Scenes, Mental Health, Ghosts, Mental Health Representation, Paranormal, Supernatural, Thriller
My Rating:
Published on: 6th September 2022
Pages: 110
Disability Representation: Anxiety, Bipolar Disorder, Chronic Fatigue, Fictional Condition, Mental Health, Panic Attacks, Suicide
Buy this Book! Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Blackwells / Bookshop.org US / Bookshop.org UK / BookBeat Audio
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The Haunting of Hill House meets The Lovely Bones in this evocative and mind-bending psychological thriller following three teen girls solving a past treacherous murder.

Nobody believes sixteen-year-old Lila Sadler, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, her sister is possessed by the ghost of Kate Watkins. As Rose's health worsens each day, the only way to save her is to uncover the awful truth of Katy's death so many years ago.

And nobody knows what happened to Katy on October 31, 1925. Not even Katy. Unaware that she was murdered, Katy has wandered for a hundred years in complete ignorance, until the day she meets Rose and Lila.

Together Lila, Rose, and Katy must confront their demons to escape. But first, they must forgive the unforgivable.

This book was provided for free by Rockstar Book Tours and the publishers in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read this book!

Content Warnings:

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After the death of their father, sisters Lila and Rose move with their mom back to the town where she grew up. They’re moving in with their mum’s sister and husband, who run a bed and breakfast called Cooper’s Inn, and while Rose is excited about how the town’s history will make an excellent subject for her film project, Lila is less enthused. She’s struggling with her new diagnosis, her father’s suicide, and the events that led to them leaving their home. There was a fire, and because of her diagnosis, no one believes her when she says someone else was there.

Rose is also struggling. Her life has been upended due to her sister’s actions, and while she knows Lila is sick, she’s the one who has to deal with Lila’s behaviour when their mum isn’t around. She just wants to get settled in, concentrate on her film project for the Young Adult Documentary award at the Kansas City Film Festival and move on with her life. That’s not easy when Lila is always rocking the boat and straight away makes an enemy of one of the girls at school.

What starts as a story of two sisters completely at odds with one another soon becomes one of bonding and sisterhood when they both spot a girl in an evening gown in the garden. Drawn together by their interest in the girl they’ve seen, Lila and Rose realise that it wasn’t a girl they saw at all; it was a ghost. Research for Rose’s film project soon becomes much more important when Rose falls ill and ends up in the hospital. Rose’s life has become tied together with a ghost from the past, Katy, and if the three girls don’t unravel the mystery of what happened to Katy back in 1925, then none of them will survive.

If you’re thinking that Rose sounds petty, you’re not wrong, and at the start of Ask the Girl, she does. There are also moments when Lila sounds awful, too, not because of her bipolar disorder; she’s just not a nice person to be around sometimes. The fact is, they are two teenage girls, and that is what teenagers can be like at times, especially when they’ve just driven hours across country to move home after their dad has committed suicide. I think it would have been unrealistic if Bartosch had written the opening scenes with them being in a perfect mood with all that on their shoulders.

It is also incredibly hard to live with someone with a mental health condition. I say that as someone with a mental health condition and as someone who has lived with multiple people with one, including relatives. Until you have been in that situation yourself, you can’t fully understand it, and Bartosch has done a good job of trying to translate that feeling into words. She has a sister who has bipolar disorder, and I can see her experiences filtering through into her writing.

I am very wary of family members writing from their perspective about disability representation, as so very often they try to write about disability from their perspective, which is to say they are writing from the perspective of looking in from the outside. No matter how close you are to someone with a mental health condition, you still don’t know what it is like to actually have that health condition. The great thing about Ask the Girl is that Bartosch has not tried to do that; she’s writing about a perspective that she has a lot of experience with, being related to someone with a mental health condition.

The mental health representation is very well done, with scenes showing Lila having panic attacks, struggling with her mental health and most importantly showing her using tools that she has been given to get her through the bad days. I find that this last one is the one that is so often glossed over in books where the emphasis is put on the drama of mental health and not on showing a realistic representation. It was also great to see Lila feel confident enough to tell a teacher she needed to go to the nurse when a panic attack began. It is so important to have a moment like that in a YA novel because young people need to know that their mental health is just as important as physical health, and they can and should be excused from classes if they need to be.

The scenes with Lila’s doctor were fantastic and felt like they were written by someone who has actually attended a mental health appointment in their life. It could have been one of my own appointments; it was that precise.

Without giving too many spoilers away, I want to talk about the chronic illness representation in Ask the Girl. Rose’s illness may be supernatural in nature; however, her symptoms are completely physical. As someone who has had their body completely turn on them out of the blue, I very much appreciate the representation that Bartosch has included. Like myself, Rose’s symptoms are body aches and exhaustion and stumped the doctors for a long time. She’s given the line that many chronically ill patients are given by doctors when they struggle to find an easy solution; it’s all in your head. Although Rose knows that there’s a paranormal explanation for her illness, as far as her doctors are aware, ghosts don’t exist, which means they should be doing everything possible to help her, not patronising her.

Ask a Girl offers a dialogue about a lot of important topics, some of which I’ve already touched upon. The death of a parent is never easy, even less so during adolescence, and the circumstances of the death of their father are particularly traumatic (please see the content warnings for details). He had the same mental health condition as Lila, and that is a lot for a young woman to deal with, especially when she has just been diagnosed. I come from a family where three generations of women have had mental health conditions, and I felt very seen by the way Bartosch handled Lila’s feelings towards her diagnosis and her father’s death. I don’t have experience with losing a close family member to suicide, so I can’t comment on that, but I do know what it’s like to look at a parent and wonder, “Is that going to be me in the future?” This sort of thing is not talked about enough in fiction or in pop culture at all.

The other topic that I wanted to specifically mention in this review was the comparison of mental health now versus the past. I don’t want to say more due to the spoilers, but there is a reason why Katy connects with Rose and Lila. I loved the way that Bartosch linked the past and the present, and as I mentioned, three generations of women in my family have struggled with mental health. My mum and grandmother had very different treatment from what I have had. Bartosch does an excellent job of showing that, despite this being the twenty-first century, the stigma surrounding mental health has not changed that much.

I’ve talked a lot about the disability representation in Ask the Girl, and if you’re more interested in paranormal mysteries, don’t worry, Bartosch has got you covered on that front too! The novel is split between three narratives, Lila, Rose and Katy, and there is plenty of spooky goodness happening. Ask the Girl is a short read at only 110 pages, but it is an action-packed one, and you will be puzzling over the mysterious messages and trying to put the pieces of research together with every turn of the page. This is a quick read that has a great mythos and punches quite a punch for its size!

About Kim Bartosch

Kim is a young adult writer of paranormal mysteries and thrillers. She is fond of ghost stories and has experienced many hauntings during several paranormal investigations. She has contributed many articles regarding travel, hauntings, and more on various sites. Kim has been on several ghost hunts across the U.S. with her sister. She photographed a ghost at the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

As an advocate for Autism and Bipolar Disorder, Kim offers her support to many charities and programs, such as Joshua Center and Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA). Kim feels there aren’t enough programs for mental disabilities. Her goal is to give as much help to set up these organizations for success so individuals, such as her autistic son and bipolar sister, will have the support they need.

Kim is an avid member of the Society of Children Book Writers & illustrators (SCBWI.org) contributing her time to many events and conferences.

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Thanks for joining me today for my first book review for GeekDis and my spot on the blog tour for Ask the Girl by Kim Bartosch, hosted by Rockstar Book Tours! I have so much more lined up for you this month for GeekDis, so follow me on social media or click the follow my blog button in the sidebar to keep up to date with everything.

Good luck to everyone taking part in the giveaway!

Don’t forget to check out the rest of my reviews if you’re looking for some more book recommendations 🙂 You can also now sign up for my newsletter to get an email each month with a list of my new reviews!

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