Nobody Told Me There'd Be Days Like These is a paperback book of fifteen stories and fifteen colour illustrations by Sydney-based New Zealanders Amanda Maxwell and Sarah Larnach. It is a book for anyone who is, or remembers what it was like to be, young. The stories and illustrations explore teen years - the fuzzy boundaries between youth and adulthood, friendship and romance, independence and loneliness and the simple, yet inescapable binary of happiness and sorrow. The stories are written with a fragile awareness; they have a pre-loved and lived in weight to them and are as much about preservation as they are about observation. The illustrations are inspired by each story, but are made personal by Larnach’s obsession with teenage hero worship and fan-art, which allows her to somehow transform the iconic into the delicate. Most of the illustrations reference well-known photographs or images by contemporary photographers and film-makers.