“It’s a very strange reality when you can’t trust yourself. There’s no foundation for anything. The faith I might have had in normal things like gravity or logic or love is gone because my mind might not be reading them correctly. You can’t possibly know what it means to doubt everything. To walk into a room full of people and pretend that it’s empty because you’re not actually sure if it is or not. To never feel completely alone even when you are.” – 3.75/5 stars!

Attention! This book contains: school uniforms, diary entries, experimental drugs, hallucinations, homemade sweets, bullying, uniforms, tennis matches, newborns, high school proms, psychiatrists, real friendships and a lot of praying.

Adam is a pretty regular teen, except he’s navigating high school life while living with paranoid schizophrenia. His hallucinations include a cast of characters that range from the good (beautiful Rebecca) to the bad (angry Mob Boss) to the just plain weird (polite naked guy). An experimental drug promises to help him hide his illness from the world. When Adam meets Maya, a fiercely intelligent girl, he desperately wants to be the normal, great guy that she thinks he is. But as the miracle drug begins to fail, how long can he keep this secret from the girl of his dreams?

For a young adult contemporary book with a mental illness theme… I was very impressed! Nowadays it’s difficult to find unique books within this genre, and this was a good example of what a good, different book is.

So if you don’t know, this story follows a teenager named Adam. He has schizophrenia and is trying a new experimental drug to control his symptoms. We get to follow his daily life in high school, the challenges he usually faces with the disease, and also the regular teenager struggles of going through puberty, finding his own path and having his first ever romantic relationship. So there was a lot going on for Adam!

The book is easy to read and the characters are easy to love. Adam is a teenager with a very realistic personality, in my opinion. It didn’t feel like just another boy in young adult contemporary fiction with a fabricated personality. He and his struggles felt very realistic, but he had a great personality. He stood up to bullies and he fought for what he believed… he wasn’t a crowd pleaser, and I loved that about him. Also, I liked his humour.

The writing style was also a positive point for me: the story is told in very personal diary entries. It was easy to follow the story and it gave a good glimpse of the way Adam thinks.

Another thing I really liked was the focus of the book: schizophrenia. I think this was the first ever fictional book I have read on the subject and I loved. I have a family member that suffers from the same disease, and this book helped me realise some things that I never completely understood. I can’t imagine what it is like to question if what is around us is real or or just a product of an hallucination. I learned a lot, and I’m happy I took so much from a single book.

The only question I have surrounding this book was the accuracy of the representation. Is this a realistic representation of schizophrenia? According to the author, she wrote this book based on reports of schizophrenic patients. So supposedly this should be realistic, but since this is written from an external source, we don’t know for sure.

Either way, I really liked this book and it was incredibly informative and interesting. I’ll be sure to keep an eye on this author!

xoxo,