“If nothing’s real, then what does it matter?” he
said. “You live here. Doesn’t that make it real enough?”
I saw this book, I wanted to read this book, I left Did
I Mention I Love You? by Estelle Maskame at 53% so that I could read this
book right about now. I'll go back to the former one day though - the author is
from Peterhead so I feel like I should.
Anyway, Made You Up is about Alex, starting her
senior year in high school, schizophrenic. She has an awfully difficult
time telling apart her delusions and reality, and thus makes an unreliable
narrator. I really love those. Anyway, she wants to graduate really bad and go
to college and not be sent to a mental hospital, so she tries to keep all
of this in check.
She makes friends, she tries to live a normal life,
falls in love, all that. This part of the book was kind of interesting but at
the same time I wanted more emphasis on the disease itself. Alex's friends are
nice and interesting, Alex herself feels like a real person, it's all good...
...Except that the way schizophrenia is portrayed
in this book is pretty much the most unrealistic thing ever. Alex portrays only
the positive symptoms (named so because they add to normal behaviour, not
because they're a good thing) and few to none of the negative ones. It's a
special snowflake YA version of an actually serious illness, and that's just
not okay.
Sadly, I liked it. My knee-jerk reaction was to give
this book a 3.5,/5 and be happy with it, round it up and carefully recommend.
But the more I think about it - how inaccurate are you allowed to be without it
being dangerously awful? I mean, this amount of misrepresentation should
be a crime (kind of like the Leave campaign for Brexit... forever salty.) and
how can you give a book like that a good score, no matter what it accomplished
(not much, really). So I went back and put it down to three, then two. Now I'll
say it's just a half rounded up. The half simply comes from the likeable
characters and the one good plot twist that I liked. The rest is just lack
of research culminated into a pretty bad book. Charlie especially was so
likeable, the little sister I never had. I want to give five stars
to Charlie alone and none to the rest of the book.
'“C’m’ere, Charlie.” I spread my arms. Charlie
hesitated, then ran across the room and climbed into my lap. I wrapped my arms
and the blanket around her. She saved me from trying to figure out how much I
should tell her. “I don’t like it when your head breaks.” I knew she was old
enough and smart enough to know that my head didn’t actually break, but she’d
been calling it that for so long it didn’t matter anymore. I think it made her feel
better to think of it like something broken that could be fixed.'
Another problem I had with the book were the side plots;
all of them were weird and unrealistic and disconnected; I just didn't
feel like they added much to the story. There's this thing about the scoreboard
at the high school that was mentioned again and again and again and Alex didn't
understand it and neither did I. There is, however, a very good central theme
about a lobster tank (red lobsters, to be more precise), and it's a shame it's
wasted on a pretty bad book.
The writing isn't that bad, it's just the research
that's lacking. And by extension, it's also lacking the care to write a good
book. What a pity, really. You shouldn't write about these things without any
background knowledge / research or at least asking someone a lot smarter than you.
I wish this book had never been published or alternatively, that Alex was just
portrayed a different kind of weird. Some fantasy special snowflake weird,
whatever. What I read was just plain disrespectful. And I really wanted this to
be good, too.
