Advice from a 12-Year-Old Nobody

By Author / Illustrator

Helen Rutter, Julia Christians

Genre

Mental Health & Wellbeing

Age range(s)

Publisher

HarperCollins Publishers

ISBN

9780008759582

Format

Paperback / softback

Published

12-02-2026

Synopsis

Vinny needs support from his agony-aunt mum, but she's too busy helping other people to notice in this empathetic tale about family and mental health by bestseller Helen Rutter.

Vinny's got problems - lots of them. His family's falling apart, and his best mates have dumped him for some really annoying girls.

He should be able to turn to his mum for help - she's an online life coach who answers other people's problems for a living. But she's too busy to see that Vinny is really struggling.

Unable to solve his own issues, Vinny starts replying to unanswered posts on an old blog of his mum's. At first the solutions seem easy, and he can be as hilariously honest as any 12-year-old boy would be, but what will happen when Vinny realises he's out of his depth?

Particularly suitable for readers aged 9+ with a reading age of 8.

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Reviews

Ruth

In Advice from a 12-Year-Old Nobody, Helen Rutter has written a heartbreakingly realistic story about the break up of a family from the main character, Vinny's, point of view.

Vinny is struggling to cope with his feelings about the distance felt between him and his Mum whilst at the same time his closest friends are leaving him out, preferring to spend time with girls rather than him. Vinny uses his Mum's PC to gain comfort through replicating her work as an agony aunt. Initially, Vinny finds the virtual world offers the distraction and support he finds lacking in his real life, but things soon spiral out of control. The end of the tale, whilst not necessarily the happy ending of many children's stories, offers a more realistic and recognisable conclusion for this book and at least for Vinny, the end of the story so far.

Advice from a 12-year-old Nobody offers a highly readable story within the hugely popular genre of realistic fiction. The story is a new publication from specialist publishers, Barrington Stoke. This super readable story has dyslexia friendly font and format, a shorter less complicated sentence structure, including simpler paragraphs and concise chapters broken up by candid illustrations by Julia Christians.

Nevertheless, this book is a great read for any and all students and is highly recommended for children aged 9+ years and above.

88 pages / Ruth Cornish