I sat down, just planning on reading the forward of this book to see what Simon had to say. I never meant to read it all. It really says something about how gripping it is that an hour and twenty minutes of straight reading later (sorry optometrist!), I had finished it all (even the acknowledgements).
I didn’t like how this book requires past knowledge to really understand the things that were going on. I was never introduced to the characters, and had to figure out for myself who matched which picture. I didn’t remember any of them, except for Harry, whom I remembered for his crazy hairstyle. It wouldn’t have been too hard for them to add onto one of the group photos the names of everyone, so I could refer to it and not be so confused. I tried (and failed) to orientate myself as to who had which background in the beginning by the order of writer. It took me a while to figure out that the order of narrators was changing all the time, so that did not help at all in lifting my veil of confusion.
Another thing that needed some past knowledge about was X-factor. Since I don’t watch X-Factor, I was pretty confused by the headings, like Week 1. I was thinking “Week one of what? What’s going on here?” Every time another week came up, I was thinking, “Surely this is the final. They can’t have that many weeks!” But no, when I got to it, the final had its own chapter name: “The Final”.
While reading this book I was convinced that it had at least three times as many pictures as words. Sometimes it took so long for me to get to the next page with writing on it that I would forget what was happening and need to go back a dozen pages to find the first half of a sentence.
I found a grammatical error in this book. “Then it would hits us” does not make any sense and I think that an editor should have picked it up.
I liked how they made it funny at times, like when Harry says, “Being cold does not give you a throat infection!” If it lacked these humorous times, I would have gotten bored quickly and read another book instead.
I think that this book improved my knowledge on One Direction and gave me an insight as to their actual characters. Before, I knew them only as “that new boy band that keeps popping up on the radio and didn’t win X-Factor”. Now, after reading about them, I know that they’re deeper than that and I realise that they’re real people with real lives.
I noticed that none of them mentioned a photographer following them around, when there must have been one to get all those photos that were in the book. I think that the photos were actually quite beneficial to the book. Without them it would have been much less interesting and far too short to be impressive-looking as a hard-cover.
Reading Forever Young has improved my view of (auto)biographies. Having just read the beginning of one and not liking the lack of action, I decided that biographies weren’t for me and never picked one up again. Now, I think that they are manageable as long as they are balanced out with lots of fiction books.
I just feel I need to mention that it is really obvious when they wear make-up. Lipstick reflects.