Book Review: Made You Up by Francesca Zappia

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First: Look at that cover.  Look. At. It. It is beautiful and I want a print of it for my walls.  There has got to be an etsy shop for this kind of thing.  *franticly googles

Alex Ridgemont is going to school for the first time as a seventeen-year-old high school senior.  She has been struggling with schizophrenia for the last ten years but finally her therapist and her mother decide that she is ready for high school.  And not just any high school but possible the trippiest, weirdest high school ever.  From the entire student body being irrationally terrified of one boy to the Principal’s creepy obsession with a scoreboard, nothing at her new school is quite right. 

The unreliable narrator factor of this book is something that actually slipped my mind until almost halfway through.  She is schizophrenic so of course what she is seeing is suspect.  Even after I remembered this I was never quite able to figure out what was real and who was not. The imagery in the book, like the cover, is stunning. 

Mental illness isn’t hard to find in books. And while I cannot vouch at all for the accuracy of the portrayal in this book I can say that it certainly made me experience the terror, frustration, pain, and sometimes even the beauty of not knowing if what you are seeing is real or only in your head.  The first person narration perfectly conveys that here. I loved Alex.  There was a sharpness and a toughness about her that kept her from become the “manic pixie dream girl”.  I found her funny and charming in a way that doesn’t often happen.

“I was diagnosed a thirteen. Paranoid got tacked on about a year later, after I verbally attacked a librarian for trying to hand me propaganda pamphlets for an underground communist force operating out of the basement of the public library. (She'd always been a very suspect type of librarian--I refuse to believe donning rubber gloves to handle books is a normal and accepted practice, and I don't care what anyone says.)”

On the other hand her parents were awful.  First, why was her father in South Africa without them?  Second, was her mother actually trying to make Alex worse?  I know that parenting a teenager isn’t the easiest thing in the world and parenting a teenager with a mental illness that much more difficult.  But come on!  Gage your audience.  Your paranoid schizophrenic daughter is probably not the most appropriate target for your passive aggressive siege.  Poor decision making throughout the book.

“There is no force in high school more powerful than one person's blunt disagreement.”

Then there is the German love interest! Ah, Miles! This is important because there really aren’t enough of them.  Also, my love interest is German so I am, you now, a little biased.  I like how he was never the uber hot bad boy.  He was sort of this extreme social outcast which made his character much unstable feeling.  You were never quite sure where he was going to fall.   To be honest there were a couple of times when I was a little afraid that he was going to shoot us the school.  There was just that much repressed rage and social miscues going on with Miles. He was not an easy character to like but he definitely worked.

This book kept me thinking, entertained me, and was well worth the time to read. I will be looking out for Francesca Zappia’s next book.