“Grace’s Guide, the Art of Pretending to Be a Grown Up,” is famous YouTuber Grace Helbig’s first book. It consists of hilarious anecdotes from her personal misadventures that are completely relatable if the words, “Yes, I have embarrassed myself before” have ever come up, and includes a surprising amount of educational advice on how to make it to adulthood.
The bulk of the book reads as a list of survival tips on how to succeed throughout high school and make it to adulthood in one piece. It mainly includes helpful advice to remember when you may be in need of a smooth ride through life or just the day.
It is Helbig’s dedication on the first page of her book that gives a perfect description of what the following pages will contain. She writes that the book is “For the anxious, awkward, wonderful weirds who constantly inspire me.”
The colorful pages equipped with pictures use every color of the rainbow, and as you flip through the book, lists made from crazily diverse fonts pop out, attracting the attention of even the most uninterested readers.
Reading Helbig’s book can be as simple as flipping open to the Table of Contents and reading just one of her many numerical lists of the must-do’s and how-to’s for leading a successful life, socially and educationally.
Being a student in high school means many things. It means you probably don’t have time to sit down and read a book. And that you most likely have a million things on your mind, all of which, more often than not, can lead to nervous breakdowns and heaps of confusion.
Helbig has created a useful tool to take some of that stress off of teenagers’ minds as she explains how she deals with her own anxiety and how she made it through college applications. She then answers some of those seemingly unanswerable questions, such as how to cure a hangover (to be saved for future reference, of course).
Helbig’s work can be thought of not as a book, but rather a Google search that gives quirky-but-accurate answers for all the questions that students may have, including lists of advice on everything from how to ask someone out to tips for successfully surviving school or the office.
But Helbig has not only provided a collection of essential advice to lead all types of students through their high school years and into their college life, but she also includes interactive pages and comic relief stories that will provoke more than one laugh as thoughts of impending tests slip away.
In one anecdote, Helbig vividly described the moment she bombed a job interview. With each silly mistake she made she provoked a laugh and created a lesson to be learned for readers without having to put them through the the same mistakes.
Additionally, Helbig incorporates fun acronyms at the end of each chapter so that when readers need to remember how to ask someone out they can simply tell themselves “D.I.M.P.L.E. F.A.X.”
And when you need to sort out your life, you can flip to one of her questionnaire pages, which include a Mad Lib and a doodle your ex boyfriend page.
Helbig has successfully written a must have book for all teenagers and young adults, who will be referencing her guide book for years to come as it is a guarantee that no one can have smooth ride through life.
Most importantly, Helbig’s frequent comical jabs at her own mistakes will make it clear to readers that adults don’t exist in the way that they may believe them to.
They make mistakes as much as the next person, and with Helbig’s book students can find comfort in the fact that they can avoid these mistakes in their futures by the assistance of Grace’s Guide.
