From the shelf: Suicide Notes

Title: Suicide Notes
Author: Michael Thomas Ford
Genre: Young Adult, Realistic Fiction
Date read: July 1-4, 2013
Dawn Rates: ★★★★ (4/5)

Summary (cr: goodreads)

I'm not crazy. I don't see what the big deal is about what happened. But apparently someone does think it's a big deal because here I am. I bet it was my mother. She always overreacts.

Fifteen-year-old Jeff wakes up on New Year's Day to find himself in the hospital. Make that the psychiatric ward. With the nutjobs. Clearly, this is all a huge mistake. Forget about the bandages on his wrists and the notes on his chart. Forget about his problems with his best friend, Allie, and her boyfriend, Burke. Jeff's perfectly fine, perfectly normal, not like the other kids in the hospital with him. Now they've got problems. But a funny thing happens as his forty-five-day sentence drags on: the crazies start to seem less crazy.

Compelling, witty, and refreshingly real, Suicide Notes is a darkly humorous novel from award-winning author Michael Thomas Ford that examines that fuzzy line between "normal" and the rest of us.

My Review: (also in goodreads)

When this book was recommended to me, I thought this would go way too dark and angst y...which I don't have a problem with; its just that too much can be an emotional burden. However, I was somewhat wrong. Sure it has angst, but the humor balanced it all out. The novel came in 1st person POV where the protagonist Jeff was narrating his 45 day stay in rehab (?) each representing a chapter. I thought at first that he had amnesia or he is in denial at whatever he really felt, but then you get to realize that the author wrote this knowledgeable of the milestones in accepting that something is indeed wrong. I enjoyed the therapy sessions with Dr. Katzrupus or as he would say, cat poop. I loved the twist, thought it caught me off guard; though I had a bit of an idea at the middle part. The ending however was a bit of a cliffhanger, I had many questions swirling but a part of me was satisfied so I'm a bit in a pinch. Overall, it was a bit of an emotional roller coaster.

Till the next read...