When you can't trust your mind, trust your heart.
Adam is a pretty regular teen--he's just 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?
My rating: 4 stars.
Content warnings: R. A good amount of cursing, and a very sex heavy/sexually natured subplot.
(spoilers ahead)
Thoughts: I didn't expect this book to actually make me emotional, but here we are.
There were things I didn't like about the book. Especially the focus on sex right around the middle of the story, and the almost constant mentions of something related to sex for a bit. And before and after that it was still not an uncommon subject to be brought up, which didn't really add anything to the story, nor did it make it more enjoyable.
But what the book did do well, it seemed to do really well. I'm not going to comment on how accurately it portrayed schizophrenia. It's not my area of expertise, and there was nothing in the book that with my very basic knowledge of the disorder seemed to me to be blatantly wrong. And that being my biggest concern about the book, it was a relief that it seemed like any mistakes made were "good faith" mistakes, and the author did put a good amount of time and research into it before writing a character with it. It didn't seem that she romanticized the disorder, like I was also afraid she would, but presented it with all its pain and hurt, but not in a hopeless way either.
Though even with that, this story's strengths came in places I didn't expect them to. I found it odd that the book was first published in 2017, but the entry dates were back in 2012. Normally when a contemporary book is dated, unless it's expressly written around a certain event, the dates are very close to those of its publication. But then the story mentioned the Sandy Hook tragedy, and it started to make sense. It's not a book about Sandy Hook. It only mentions it for five chapters, if that even. But those chapters are powerful, in their challenging of how neurotypical people look at, and treat events like mass shootings. And how our reaction can make those suffering with mental illnesses feel even more unsafe than their mind already does. It's definitely something I felt deserved more thought, and it deserves to be reevaluated in our society as well.
And my favorite parts of the book were things I haven't exactly seen done very well before. Adam's family and therapist. The unnamed, mostly silent therapist is an ever present figure through the whole book (the format is written as letters to the therapist because Adam doesn't want to talk to him) and even if the POV character is silent and resentful about him, it was easy for me to tell that the therapist was actually very skilled, competent, and patient with his job. By the end, Adam accepts that he does need the man's help, and very slowly begins to open up and let himself receive more help than he had before. We don't see the ultimate conclusion to this, but we see the very beginning, and it's enough to know that it will happen, perhaps slowly but that's okay.
Adam's family is off the top of my head, my favorite YA family so far. Everyone struggles, just as Adam does, but they don't let it get in their way of being a loving, supportive, healthy family for the main character. What got me to tear up though was near the end, Adam's normally somewhat distant stepfather shows how he truly feels in a moment that's filled with love and care. Being used to seeing family presented as something to be gotten away from as much and as soon as possible in other YA books, the time and attention dedicated to Adam's family blew me away and made me a lot more forgiving toward some of the book's other flaws.
Overall I would call it a good book. But unfortunately not one I feel like I can suggest to most people, due to the graphic and repeated nature of the sexual subplot. However if you're willing to skip or look over that, and it's an area of interest for you, it probably would be worth reading.
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