Luca’s dream has been to attend the Australian Dance School for as long as he can remember. So when he sustains a career ending injury after a ballet class, his whole life is upended when he loses his friends, passion and school all at once. While making new connections and starting over, Luca must grapple with who he is outside of ballet.

This was a beautiful book. Many characters grieve throughout this story - they grieved friendships, lost opportunities, and the loss of a partner. And yet, this book is full of heart, hope, and love. Seeing Luca grow from this experience was great, and I truly adored Luca’s dad and the way he fully accepted and celebrated his son throughout the novel.

Luca and Jordan’s flirtation was fun, and I really felt for Luca as he waited for Jordan to figure out the newly discovered attraction he felt. I also loved Amina and the enthusiasm she brought to everything!

The audiobook was a delight to listen to, and I thought the narrator nailed the performance completely. A treat I wasn’t expecting was a conversation between the writer and narrator after the story which I really enjoyed. It’s powerful to read an own voices queer love story and hear it read by a gay narrator!

This has Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda vibes, but I like it better!

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with this title in exchange for an honest review.

Sometimes you read a book and immediately know it would adapt so seamlessly to the big screen, perhaps listening to the audiobook version of Anything But Fine made this even more evident. Let's start by the fact that the narrator was absolutely amazing and—as was his intention going by the little interview he had with the author at the end of the book—truly transported us inside Luca's mind. Ballet is who Luca is, or so he thought before falling down a flight of stairs and suffering a career-ending injury. At least now he gets to see the cute football player that goes to the same physical therapy office as he does—not that it matters, because Jordan is totally straight... Or is he?

What ensues is a quippy story that threads between the teams of loss, identity, grief and friendship. I loved every second of it and I'm sure anyone who's looking for themselves will grow to love Luca's (most of the time) inner banter.

Luca has been all about Ballet for as long as he can remember, but after a freak accident destroys his foot, he loses everything he ever knew. He loses ballet, his friends, and his school. But is there a bright side to this tragedy? Enter Amina the nicest and nerdiest girl at his new school, who may just be his new best friend, and Jordan Tanaka-Jones, the cute and seemingly straight captain of the rowing and Football (soccer) teams as Luca's new school.

WOW! I loved this book so much! It gave me The Sky Blue vibes by Robbie Couch, which I also loved. I loved the characters and their relationships. Amina and Luca's friendship is amazing. Amina is just too sweet! I love how Jordan and Luca's relationship blossoms and seeing how they deal with all the obstacles that come up. I also liked seeing Luca and his dad's relationship. I liked that the story dealt with Luca's recovery but also had a queer journey with some talk about more-difficult topics of racism and homophobia. I liked how the characters handled themselves in those situations. This book gave me all the feels when the romance began and progressed! Love love love!!!

audio-specific: the narrator was absolutely amazing! I thought he did a fantastic job of bringing Luca to life. In my version of the audiobook, I got to hear a conversation between the narrator and the author. I loved hearing more about the narrator's process for narrating the story. He said that he created the character's voices as if they were through Luca's eyes, meaning the story is a monologue and he is making the voices as Luca would have created them when telling his story to someone. I loved that and I could totally see what he meant by that. Also that accent! haha. Matthew Backer is definitely a new favorite narrator of mine!

I highly recommend checking out this novel and if you do, I highly recommend the audiobook. Both are perfection!

content warning: homophobia, Islamaphobia, racism, and racial slurs, toxic friendships, injury, death of a parent, and grief

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to listen to this audio book in return for an honest review.
Synopsis
Luca is ready to audition for the Australian Ballet School. All it takes to crush his dreams is one missed step . . . and a broken foot.

Jordan is the gorgeous rowing star and school captain of Luca's new school. Everyone says he's straight - but Luca’s not so sure . . .

As their unlikely bond grows stronger, Luca starts to wonder: who is he without ballet? And is he setting himself up for another heartbreak?

A perfect ya novel, surrounding the challenges faced from a life and dream altering injury (having suffered a fairly similar injury) I found the story was as uplifting and inspirational as it was devastating in all honesty, but it felt realistic and believable too. Perfectly formed likeable characters, for me especially Luca and his father. Beautifully written and narrated and possibly a perfect addition to a curriculum discursive novel. Thoroughly recommend. #Jorecommends

I loved Luca and found this to be very authentic and likeable. It had some love scenes, but nothing that crossed the line. I loved the secondary characters and found them to be very three dimensional, especially Amina. Only reasons I didn’t give it a 5: I thought the Australian terminology might turn some students off & it may not book talk well. However, I think anyone who picks it up will love it.

Dance, an injury that could devastate, Ballet and rich private school and the challenge of finding love. Can a relationship between the ballet dancer and the rowing captain ever work.

Thank you to NetGalley and RB Media Recorded Books for an ALC of Anything But Fine in exchange for my honest opinion.
Anything But Fine was a terrific listen - the story is really sweet and the narration by Matthew Backer was wonderful. I could listen to his accent all day long!
Anything But Fine follows Luca, a 16-year-old gay ballet dancer in Australia, after he misses a step and falls down the stairs of his dance school, shattering both his foot and his ballet aspirations. Luca grapples with the transition to life not primarily focused on ballet. Luca has attended a school where he has a ballet scholarship, and his best friends are the girls he dances with, so while on crutches as his foot heals, he has to switch to a new school where he has no friends. While attending physical therapy, Luca meets a senior at his new school, Jordan Tanaka-Jones, with whom he feels an immediate connection. What follows is a sweet coming-of-age story with diverse characters involved in realistic situations.
As a former dancer, I love reading about dancers. I completely identified with Luca’s realization that he was never praised in his dance training. His instructors, like mine, always wanted him to focus on improving, whereas when he is in physical therapy, he gets cheered on for walking a few steps on his own.
Family relationships are explored for three of the main characters. I really loved that Luca’s father accepted and celebrated his son’s lifestyle. Not that they always got along, but it was refreshing to read about a positive, supportive family structure.
I think you’ll enjoy this book if you’re a fan of YA coming-of-age stories, and if you’re also a fan of ballet, this will be even more enjoyable. I highly recommend the audiobook because of the great narration with the Australian accent! It will be available 3/29/22 in the US and it’s currently available in Australia!

Anything But Fine follows the changing life of Luca a 16 year old gay ballet dancer living in Ballarat, Australia. The narrator Matthew Backer brings all of the characters to life very well. This YA novel is about how Luca deals with facing challenges that come when he gets injured and no longer can dance. I think this book in generally very good.

A few things that I think could have been improved:
- I think it would've been interesting to have also had Jordan's POV
- I think there should have been more about ballet, it didn't feel like it was talked about as much as it should have
- I would have had more character development for the other character's in the story. I feel like Luca developped
throughout the novel but I feel like Amina, Jordan and especially Grace's character stayed pretty stagnant. I
would have liked to have a little more about Grace's character in general as well.

This story explores relationships of all types: familial relationships, platonic relationships, and romantic relationships.

I really enjoyed the interview at the end between the author and the narrator, I feel like it added a lot to an already great book.

Thank you NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this audiobook.

Hilariously narrated by Matthew Backer, "Anything But Fine" is a sweet coming-of-age YA book with a relatable queer main character challenged by an injury which turns his life upside down. It's a very heartfelt teenage drama set in a little Australian town with very loveable characters and very strong on themes such as friendship, or trying to speak your truth and/or struggling to find the courage to do so, t's not perfect per se, but I found it very enjoyable nevertheless and I'm sure many other people will.

I loved this book so much!! Heartfelt gratitude to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me access to this amazing audiobook in exchange for a review!
I really want to write a specific and coherent review but all I think is quite literally "I LOVED this book". I think I read it at the perfect time and it was just what I needed. It was just the rigjt amount of cute and it made me feel all the emotions.
The themes addressed in the book were specially amazing to me, suddenly not being able to do what you had thought you would do for most of your life in Luca's case, fighting for what you want to do in Amina's made me want to hug this book! And then Jordan's journey towards accepting himself as queer was so great, it brought tears to my eyes!!
The theme of grief in respect to Luca's mom was also done really well and was very heartbreaking for me. The part where Luca and his dad finally remember her together is definitely one of my most favorites!
And the friendship!!! Amina is such a great character, I definitely won't mind getting a book about her next ;) Not only she was a great friend, she was also powerful and fierce and I just, LOVED :')
The narrator played a huge role as well, I loved the narration, it kept me hooked to the book and made me laugh at a lot of the parts I just might not have laughed if I were reading.
Highly, highly recommend to everyone :')

I listened to the audio version of this book and I totally loved the narrator as well as the book. It made me laugh and I came close to crying at least once. It is a lovely story of friendship and love and hopes and dreams. Luca is in his 11th year of school and on his way to becoming a ballet sensation when he breaks his foot and crushes his dream along with his bones. He loses his scholarship to his school and must go to the local public school where he makes a new friend and possibly a boyfriend? Such a fun read! I highly recommend it.

Local ballet dancing teenager breaks his foot, learns he will not be able to dance anymore and decides to focus on his new friendship and his new crush instead.

In general, this is a basic YA contemporary set in Australia: you have the main character finding himself at a new school, making a new friend, falling for a boy, and having some trouble at home. I feel the things that would have made things this story stand out (e.g. having a possible career cut short due to an injury or being the only out queer person at school) were not included much which was a letdown for me. I would also say that the story has one too many common tropes you can find in any "white, gay coming-of-age books" that fill the shelves.

I can't quite put my finger on why exactly I felt annoyed during many points in the story due to writing and plot choices that go beyond personal taste but especially the ending rubbed me the wrong way.


Let's start with the audio. Matthew Baker is a fine narrator and fits Luca to a t but the audio files were not mixed very well. There are so many instances after a new paragraph where his voice comes in sounding very different. It very much feels like there were last-minute additions so the narrator had to insert the parts later on.
They also change the setting whenever phone conversations happen to make them appear real which might be a problem for some listeners.

As for the actual book...
I appreciate the candidness in the writing. Luca curses, there are inappropriate boners and his selfishness are all things you can easily identify as typical teenager behavior. While I felt the narration was at times to focused on keeping the 3rd person POV too limited and in turn making all of Luca's reactions appear to be "in the right", I can't fault a teenager for having messy emotions.
What I definitely missed was any discussion of ballet. Luca does not think about classes anymore, dismisses all his friends (who turn into clichés), doesn't listen to classical music, does not pick up any other sport, and he barely wonders about his future. At 16, the implications of not getting a not getting to be a professional ballet should earn a bit more introspection and reflection - but it's all glossed over.

The standout character here is Amina. She is an Indonesian Muslim girl who befriends Luca and is just as awkward as you might expect. Those just had a connection and their moments together were probably my favourite. I loved the humble moments where he recognized he doesn't know what Ramadan is or doesn't know if he can talk about her hijab.
Jorand, the love interest, feels less developed. I found the drama between the two realistic enough even if Luca's internal monologue did not give anyone else the benefit of the doubt.

There is also a small subplot about Luca's father still grieving about his dead wife and while I won't police how anyone deals with such a situation, some of the messages did not sit right with me when it comes to the "solution".


Overall, I think there are just a lot of statements and assumptions made by the main character/the author I disagree with (from the idea that he needs to have sex to be gay, to his less than stellar reaction when Jordan comes out as if he wasn't expecting it, to confirming all kinds of stereotypes) that never get unpacked, so Luca remains the same person I was in the beginning of the book.

TWs: Ableism, homophobia, classism, Islamophobia, racism, cheating, outing, f-slur, toxic relationships, underage drinking, pressure to come out, death of a parent,

If I had to sell this book in a line it would be Australian Everybody's Talking About Jamie but if he became disabled.

This book was so deeply relatable to me as someone who became disabled from an accident and wasn't able to do my sports any more as well as being a ballet child and coming out at a really young age.

The internalised ableism when you're recovering from the initial accident was so well portrayed and had me tearing up from how much I was relating to it.

There are some things that I'm quite on the fence about, the Muslim rep, the pressure on the LI to come out, things like that but overall this book was a good time and it's really nice to see some Australian queer YA because I feel like I don't see a huge amount

So objectively speaking as a whole, I really generally liked this book. It is a story about Luca who is a ballet dancer and set to be a fantastic ballet dancer except a career ending injury leaves him with both a crushed foot and dream.

Luca has to leave his love of ballet behind, his school, and his friends and start a new school. He is the only queer person and there is some homophobic language used and slurs. Anyway, Luca meets Jordan at one of his physical therapy appointments and turns out to go to the same school now. Except Jordan is Captain of the football team and the rowing team and very seemingly straight. Luca is the gay guy with a broken foot who has no friends.

Except Luca does have one friend, and that is Amina. Amina is the absolute star of this book. I don't care what anyone says, I don't care that she's a secondary character, she is the best and she got fucked over. I loved her so much and I am upset on her behalf for Luca and Jordan being assholes.

Okay now that I'm rambling let's continue. There is some friend drama from Luca's old friends and also with his new singular friend. Eventually Jordan kind of starts hanging out with them but very on the down low because God forbid anyone catch him with the gay guy and the nerdy Muslim girl. There are also a handful of islamophobic moments in this just as a CW. Amina is Indonesian and a Muslim and she also wears hijab.

So basically Luca and Jordan start dating in secret and fuck everyone over and then there's some family drama with Luca and his father. There's a lot going on in this book It's kind of hard to describe without giving away everything. Not that it's not predictable because it's totally predictable, but in the way that YA is predictable. It's not a bad thing necessarily and I liked that the characters were flawed but there were some big red flags that I have to mention.

My first red flag is the use of the phrase "actively gay " and that is in relation to Luca saying that he's gay but he's not actively gay because he hasn't actually had sex yet. Can we please stop? I'm so exhausted by this rhetoric that you have to be in a romantic or sexual relationship in order for your queerness to be valid. Your queerness is not dependent on a partner or your sexual activity. I do think that after this phrase was mentioned I got a little bit annoyed with this book and maybe nitpicked more than I normally would.

The other thing that drove me absolutely wild was the fact that Luca is gay but still so absolutely blind to the fact that other types of queer exist. He sits there and assumes people's sexualities and automatically thinks of it as a binary, one or the other. No wonder Jordan, who is questioning potentially bi or pan didn't want to come out because of Luca's attitude. It's freaking annoying.

Then there's the way that Jordan and Luca treated Amina. Now I think that both Jordan and Luca were kind of assholes during this and they both fucked up a lot but the way that they collectively treated Amina was garbage. The fact that she forgave them so easily was nonsense. I think that Luca had some growing up to do about what it's like to come out of the closet later and not as a preteen and Jordan has some growing up to do about how to treat people even when you're scared. Both of them kept secrets and contributed to a lot of emotional damage for Amina and that is just unacceptable and I'm angry about it.

So I'm supposed to be doing a pride book tour for this book and I received the audio copy from NetGalley and so I'm probably going to try and read it again. I think this book has a lot of redeeming qualities and is a genuinely good book but there were a couple red flags that spiked my annoyance. I also listen to this book at a time when I was annoyed with my non-book-related life as well and so I will probably give another shot before my book tour date.

I do still recommend this book and there's an audience for it but it is important to be aware of some of the CW as I mentioned and also some of the potentially aphobic language.

White gay Australian MC, Japanese Australian LI, Indonesian Muslim SC. Set in Australia

Audiobook Galley - I thought this title was beautifully written. I loved the characters and the plot. This book will appeal to many teens who struggle with finding their place and finding the courage to speak up about what they really want. This belongs in every teen collection!

Beautiful coming of age book of a group of friends that step put of rheir comfort zone and self discovery. I believe that ALL kids should find a book that sees themselves in books. This book is for all kids that have questions or need to feel seen. The audiobook was incredible.

This book captured my heart. During the first few pages of this book, Luca, the refreshingly relatable main character in Tobias Madden's Anything But Fine, loses his dream of becoming a professional ballet dancer. His first-person journey into a whole new life is engaging, self-deprecating, and, at times, quite funny. What made me fall in love with this book, however, is that Luca's sexual identity is one of the few things never in doubt. Luca is a gay 16 year old at home in his identity. He is accepted by his family and other adults in his life. Even the predictably awkward teen dramas feel believable and modern. The way the Madden represents Islamophobia, homophobia, and bullying without preaching, was also worth applauding. I thoroughly enjoyed this read.

This book was really cute and so hilarious! I had been gifted a physical ARC from a friend, but I also got an audiobook ARC on netgalley for this book so I half-read/half-listened to this book. I very much enjoyed Luca and his struggles after his injury. As someone who has had a severe leg injury and had to relearn how to walk I really related to his fear of the stairs, the thing that injured him. Luca, his Dad, Jordan, and Amina were all delightful and I felt for all of them. Luca going through his many personal struggles. His Dad trying to help his son through the aforementioned struggles while also still struggling with the death of his wife (which was a long time ago but do you ever really move on from the loss of your soulmate?). Jordan who is questioning his sexuality while knowing many of his friends are homophobic pricks and being unsure of his family's reaction. And Amina who is quite possibly the sweetest character I have ever come across in any book ever, but faces islamophobia at school/outside it too, a family that doesn't support her dreams, and a crush that is just not going to work out.

Also, as a note specifically for the audiobook, I really really loved the narrator and the fact that when a character was talking to someone on the phone the would actually sound like they were on a phone! Thank you to Netgalley and Recorded Books Media for the Audiobook arc in exchange for an honest review.

3 stars

i personally wasn't a huge fan of this novel but i definitely get the appeal! in this sweet YA novel we follow luca's journey as he gets a bad injury that challenges his ballet career. this novel deals with the time after his injury and so on.

this is a character driven book which is usually my type of book but i just didn't love the characters so.. you know. the main character was alright but that's all he was really. i loved Amina though!

i did assume this was more ballet related which is completely my fault but that did skew my expectations a lot.

this was a very cute read but not anything that special. definitely check it out if you want a quick, queer, character driven, book though.

thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an audio ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Pretty Good.

There's a whole lot that I liked about Anything But Fine. A ballet dancer suffering from an identity crisis after a career fatal injury that also forces him to lose everything- that premise alone is so intriguing. A huge theme of friendships and acceptance. But there was a lot I wish was different.

I expected the central aspect of it was identity and recovery after discovering Luca couldn't do the thing he wanted to do his entire life. There are moments it's touched on but not enough. I expected this to be about Luca and ballet with a romance b-plot- it very much isn't that. I didn't care for the romance. Luca and Jordan had decent chemistry as friends but they as a couple did not work for me. Their relationship didn't have a natural flow to me.

Too much of the plot relied on the romance aspect, too much on the romance relied on Luca's attraction. <spoiler> I really hate how much Luca was seeing Jordan cry and thinking about how great his arms look. Are you kidding? </spoiler> I wanted to see more of Luca outside of Jordan. Especially with Luca's relationship with his father.

I saw a lot of potential storylines this could've gone. Mostly, I wished for more introspection, more connection to family, and reevaluation. Prepare for more of openly gay character gets into a "relationship" with closeted character- a trope I'm somewhat done it as it always ends the same.

Still, I did love Luca's and Amina's friendship. I really loved Luca's dad, I wish we had more time with him and explored their relationship a lot better. It's a nice read if you want something easy. There are homophobic moments thrown around, and racism against Muslims as well.

About the audio: Matthew Backer has good inflection in his voice and good comedic timing. He gives every character a realistic voice. There are some bits you can tell were rerecorded as they didn't match the same pitch as the previous sentence which was a bit jarring to listen to.

All in all, decent good, could've been spectacular if the author's priorities were different. Or maybe I just expected a different book entirely.