Book review: A History of My Weird by Chloë Heuch

We continue our reviews of books shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year award for 2025. This time we consider one of the titles in the Children and Young People category.

You can vote for this year’s People’s Choice Award here. 

Jon Gower

Mo is the feisty central character of the second YA novel by north-Wales-based author Chloë Heuch, and she needs to be. She is facing a carnival of challenges, such as starting secondary school with all its attendant classroom and breaktime politics.

These are exacerbated for her because of being neurodiverse. Mo ends up in detention pretty much straight away, unfairly accused of pushing another girl. She also has to negotiate the bodily changes of puberty and to cap it all, face maths lessons with the cold-hearted Miss Pool, a monstrous teacher fresh out of central casting. The book is very good on the detail of classroom tension:

‘”Okay, 7D, you have ten minutes to complete the task. There will be no talking.”

There are numbers scattered all over the board. There’s something about minus numbers that I never understand. I mean if you have one cake how on earth can you have minus cakes? You have cake or you have no cake. Maths makes my brain shrivel up and die.’

Friendless

Worse even than maths, perhaps, is Mo’s lack of friends and seeming inability to make any. That is, until Carys enters her life. Carys, who would rather be called Onyx, is going through her own trials, not least having to deal with her domineering father who stubbornly refuses to accept her growing sense of her own sexuality, a gender fluidity he thinks can be cured. By therapy.

So when Mo and Onyx start enjoying the early stages of their friendship it is only to be stymied by Miss Pool or Onyx’s dad, yet they determinedly find ways of enjoying each other’s company.

Asylum

Mo’s tendency to take up special interests with enthusiasm leads to a very active fascination with the nearby, dilapidated Denham asylum where its Victorian walls are “tall and forbidding, dark with damp. The roof has caved in. Blackened struts stick out at weird angles, like mouldy bones.” She becomes enthralled by the place, especially when she learns how neurodiverse people used to be incarcerated there and that a relative of hers was locked away at Denham in the 1940s.

Halloween escapade

The new friends decide to break into the place and, not satisfied with that adventure, decide to visit the basement at night, and not only that but do so on Halloween. This becomes a darker adventure than either of them had planned, but I won’t give too much away. Suffice it to say that it’s a gripping read, with an unexpected but deftly-handed introduction of the supernatural into what is already a scary episode.

Acting skills

This could seem too much going on for Mo, but she is also being drawn into the world of school drama where her gymnastic abilities and latent acting skills manage to get her cast in the next production. The show beckons at the end of this engaging book, which shares a lot of insight into the world of its neurodiverse schoolgirl lead and does so with subtlety and accuracy.

A History of My Weird is a lively, sprightly paced book that celebrates difference and friendship, and underlines how the latter can be both a bridge and bond between people who are not at all similar. Oh, and a happy ending? You bet. Besties Mo and Onyx make sure of that.

A History of My Weird by Chloë Heuch is published by Firefly Press and is available from all good bookshops.

The English language titles shortlisted for this year’s award are:

Poetry Award
Girls etc, Rhian Elizabeth (Broken Sleep Books)
Little Universe, Natalie Ann Holborow (Parthian Books)
Portrait of a Young Girl Falling, Katrina Moinet (Hedgehog Poetry Press)

Fiction Award – Supported by the Rhys Davies Trust
Earthly Creatures, Stevie Davies (Honno)
Clear, Carys Davies (Granta)
Glass Houses, Francesca Reece (Headline Publishing Group, Tinder Press)

Creative Non-Fiction Award – Sponsored by Hadio
Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape, Carwyn Graves (Calon Books)
Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling, Gwyneth Lewis (Calon Books)
Nature’s Ghosts: The world we lost and how to bring it back, Sophie Yeo (HarperNorth)

Children & Young People Award
A History of My Weird, Chloe Heuch (Firefly Press)
Fallout, Lesley Parr (Bloomsbury)
Why Did My Brain Make Me Say It?, Sarah Ziman (Troika)

You can vote for your favourite by clicking here