Desperately Seeking Normal by Tanya Bullock

From Goodreads

Life as the single mum of a teen with learning difficulties is tough... but it gets so much harder when puberty hits.

To single mum Izzie's alarm...

...all her daughter Jaya, 18, wants from life is to get married and have babies.

This creates a moral dilemma for Izzie:

How can she continue to protect her daughter whilst at the same time letting her go?

In the small Midlands town where they live, there is little prospect of meaningful employment or continuing education for Jaya. So, Izzie wonders, would finding a 'suitable husband' via an arranged marriage for half-Indian Jaya be so crazy?

But when Jaya falls head over heels for a teaching assistant in her college's Special Educational Needs department, a disastrous sequence of events are set in motion.

Life for Jaya and Izzie is turned around in ways that nobody could ever have foreseen.

Desperately Seeking Normal is a revised and retitled edition of That Special Someone.

My thoughts

My thanks to TBConFB Reviewer group for the opportunity to read this in exchange for an honest review. I was late getting round to reading the story, as life has got in the way for various reasons.

I gave this a 3 stars or 6/10.  It was a well written and unusual story about Izzie and her daughter Jaya. Jaya is 18 years old, but isn't like the majority of 18 years old. She has a few problems that a lot of teenagers don't have with having learning difficulties. As Izzie tries to deal with the complexities of having a teenage child that is dealing with all the problems that normal young ladies have to deal with following puberty, these are heightened due to Jaya's learning difficulties. As Izzie tries to distract Jaya from her doomed love interest in a teaching assistant at her college, things take a turn that no one expected.

As the story flits from person to person in a chapter and then occasionally that person has a chapter of their own the story takes a little getting used to, but once you have it flows well. 

This is the first story that I have read by Tanya Bullock and I look forward to reading more by her in the future.