Review Detail

“I don’t like it when your head breaks.”

This book pulled me out of an awful reading slump during which I started four books and got bored ten minutes into each one of them. So, for that, thank you Ms Zappia.

This book is about Alex, a girl who’s been diagnosed with schizophrenia and paranoia which makes her, for the sake of this book, an unreliable narrator. She starts a new year in a new High School because she fucked up attending her last one. Here she’s the new kid and tries really hard not to make anyone find out about her condition. She befriends a new bunch of people amongst which there’s Miles. His face and his personality remind her of someone who cannot be real but she’s drawn to him nonetheless. During the year she does good and fucks up again, all of this accompanied by occasions in which you cannot really understand whether she’s allucinating or not.

“If nothing’s real, then what does it matter?” he said. “You live here. Doesn’t that make it real enough?”

I found the writing fast paced but also weird at times. In more than one occasion I found the dialogues forced and awkward. I’d have preferred the High School setting not to have been so obvious and cliché. The bullies should have been given more space and depth, also because, in at least one occasion, that would have made us sympathize with one of them a little bit more. Every now and then the story felt like it was trying to cram together too many topics: bullism, mental illness, romance, mystery, drama… So there were moments in which I didn’t know how much more I could take. Nonetheless I did really like this story. You see the world through the eyes of a person who’s deemed “insane” by society, someone who needs a lot of help but is given almost none. In more than one occasion you’d just want to take Alex and marathon with her the entire series of Scrubs, drinking hot chocolate, cozying into a pillow fort.
And the major plot twist… AAHHH with all the tv shows I watch I should have seen that coming!
Totally recommended!