Everything Amplified – at a glance
The School Reading Lists’ five word review: Music, identity, sibling tension, overload.
Children’s book title: Everything Amplified.
Children’s author: Sarah Lippett and Ziggy Hanaor.
Children’s illustrator: Sarah Lippett.
Genre: YA Graphic Novel.
Published by: Cicada Books.
ISBN: 9781800660601.
Recommended for young adults aged: 14+.
First published: Hardback September 2025.
This children’s book is ideal for: Children who feel overwhelmed by school, friendships, and expectations, and who use music to manage emotion or escape pressure.
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Our review:
Everything Amplified is an outstanding YA graphic novel about music, identity, and growing up in a digital world. It follows 15-year-old Nel, who feels stuck. School is exhausting, friendships are shifting, and her parents seem to miss what’s really going on. Her twin brother Ludo, by contrast, seems to glide through life – popular, confident, and always at ease. Nel watches from the sidelines, and her playlist is the only steady thing she can rely on.
When Ludo joins a band and Kit, Nel’s best friend, starts dating the guitarist, Nel’s sense of stability begins to unravel. But when Ludo drops out, Nel finds herself stepping into his place. It’s a turning point, and as the story plays out through performance, emotion, and conflict, Nel starts to re-evaluate who she is and where she belongs.
Everything Amplified cleverly blends streams of conversation and thought with concentration-breaking interludes of social media style interruption: journalists’ bios glimpsed from a smartphone; band wikis from the internet; articles popping up from a feed – mirroring the fragmented cadence and sensory overload of daily teen life. The plot pace isn’t just rapid, it’s continuous. Imagine James Joyce writing a novel, one comic frame at a time, for a 2025 Instagram Reel on x2 fast forward. You can expect 14+ year olds to read 300+ pages of this weighty hardback in one sitting.
Sometimes everything feels heavy and uncomfortable. My body, my family, my life… And the only thing that releases that weight is music…
The story’s structure reflects real teenage experience – moments of focus broken by digital noise, scattered thoughts, and overlapping pressures. Nel’s internal voice carries the narrative, switching between reflection and reaction in a rhythm that mirrors the chaos of growing up.
Our verdict
Everything Amplified is a high-energy, emotionally charged graphic novel that doesn’t slow down. It gives readers a story that feels recognisable, while also providing a way to think through questions of friendship, independence, and identity. Its multimedia style, mixing artwork, dialogue, and digital fragments, captures the pace of modern teenage life.
Raw and gripping, this standout graphic novel presents a world teenagers will relate to and empathise with. The language, feel, and atmospheric frustration are convincing elements that make this graphic novel ideal for 14+ year olds. It’s perfect for KS4 and is likely to be extremely popular with secondary school students. Highly recommended.
Teaching and book club discussion ideas
- Explore how music functions as escape, comfort, or identity.
- Discuss how Nel and Ludo respond differently to pressure.
- Examine how digital interruptions reflect teen attention and overload.
- Use the band scenes to talk about confidence, risk, and performance.
- Analyse the book’s format as a visual stream of thought.
- Compare friendships before and after key turning points in the story.
- Reflect on the impact of female role models in Nel’s journey.
- Debate whether visibility brings freedom or new pressure.
- Investigate how setting shapes a young person’s view of their future.
- Use social media-style inserts as writing prompts for character backstories.
Many thanks to Cicada Books for the review copy.
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