The Quick Cut: A teen girl struggles to recognize reality from hallucination when starting a new school.
A Real Review:
As humans, we have a tendency to believe what we see. Why wouldn't we? When you are schizophrenic, that is one of the many things you learn cannot be trusted. For Alex, that is a reality she lives every day.
Alex is starting a new high school determined to keep her sanity long enough to get into college. However, when she meets a boy that she assumed was a hallucination from her past - all that internal distrust gets increased. Can she make it through high school or has she already lost all the sanity she ever had?
Story wise, this book is solid. A girl encountering a guy she thought wasn't real makes for a lovely tale. Unfortunately, that is where the positive remarks end and the problems begin.
It's fairly clear that the author here gave an extremely watered down version of what schizophrenia is. Alex as a character only experiences hallucinations, never delusions. She doesn't struggle with communication and when she doesn't take her medications, the resulting blowback is fairly low. That's without getting into how at her age, doctors would have been more likely to suggest it was drugs or another condition altogether.
Googling schizophrenia as a medical condition with fairly low effort tells you that the author made a very mild attempt at best to represent this condition well. "Words on Bathroom Walls" did a much better job at showcasing this with some realism.
A poor attempt to showcase the life of someone with schizophrenia.
M
My rating: 2 out of 5 rating: 2 out of 5