Made You Up in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

May 08, 2016 Nadine in NY Jones rated it really liked it

Shelves: young-adult, unreliable-narrator

Was everything made up? Was this whole world inside my head? If I ever woke up from it, would I be inside a padded room somewhere, drooling all over myself?

Would I even be myself?

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

This. Book. Is. So. Good.

I think this might be the best non-sci fi/fantasy YA book I've read in my adult life. Once I started reading I did not want to stop. I cancelled all my plans and just read. (Don't yo

Was everything made up? Was this whole world inside my head? If I ever woke up from it, would I be inside a padded room somewhere, drooling all over myself?

Would I even be myself?

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

This. Book. Is. So. Good.

I think this might be the best non-sci fi/fantasy YA book I've read in my adult life. Once I started reading I did not want to stop. I cancelled all my plans and just read. (Don't you love when that happens?).

This was unputdownable. Not because it was edge-of-your-seat action, and not because I couldn't wait to find out what would happen next (to be honest, the plot is kind of a hot mess), and not even because I liked the characters (although I did like the characters). It was just so well written, I didn't want to stop reading.

“Yoo-hoo?” I offered the drink.

“What’s a Yoo-hoo?”

I pushed the drink a little closer to his face, in case he hadn’t seen it. He took the bottle and inspected the straw.

“Mom said I shouldn’t drink after someone else. It’s unsanitary.”

“But it’s chocolate,” I replied.

I don't even like Yoohoo, but that really tickled me.

From the author note at the end, it appears that Ms Zappia wrote this while she was still in high school, which is just amazing to me. (But in retrospect, this does explain a few things, in particular: why it had such an authentic teen feel, why the adult characters were so two dimensional, why the plot was sort of all over the place.) I can't wait to read whatever she writes next!!

Full disclosure: I do not know anyone with schizophrenia, so I do not know how realistic this portrayal is. I suspect this is not very realistic at all, and if that matters to you, you might not like this book at all.

I read this for the BookRiot Read Harder 2016 Challenge, "main character with a mental illness." This is a perfect example of a book I loved that I never would have read otherwise, if not for the Reading Challenge. ...more

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