Made You Up

Gr 9 Up—Alex is starting her senior year at a new high school, making a clean start after an incident at her previous school. She just wants to keep her grades up and perform her mandatory community service so she can get into college. But Alex knows she'll have a hard time achieving these goals, since she has paranoid schizophrenia. She keeps her illness to herself, hoping that between her doctor, her medication, and her own homegrown coping strategies, no one else need ever know. But on her first day at her new school, she meets a boy who looks exactly like someone she hallucinated on the day her illness first manifested 10 years earlier. And although Miles is not entirely friendly, he may be the only person who understands her. This is a wonderfully complicated book. Adolescence can be absurd, breathless, and frantic on its own. Combine it with mental illness, and things get out of control very quickly. Zappia sets a fast pace that she maintains throughout. Readers will be kept on their toes with quick-witted dialogue, pop culture references, and some odd but accurate word choices, as well as plot twists and big reveals (which may inspire some to reread and see where hints were dropped). While Alex may be unreliable, she is sympathetic from the start. Miles, however, is somehow more complicated than Alex and will almost certainly make readers question their responses to him.