For that one instance in time, everything is good in the world. Indulging.īut when Christmas finally comes, and that warm, tingly, mints-and-sweaters-and-fireplace-fires feeling gathers in the bottom of your stomach, and you're lying on the floor with all the lights off but the ones on the Christmas tree, and listening to the silence of the snow falling outside, you see the point. The rest of the year, I wondered if the point of Christmas was just spending money and getting fat and opening gifts. Sometimes it felt like I only got happy this way around Christmas.

For example, here is Alex's description of her favorite holiday:

Author Francesca Zappia imbues Alex with charm and makes her very endearing, even as she is crafting nonsensical and destructive schemes. However, there are lots of great things about the characters, too. A school administrator who was standing right next to the fatal scoreboard and was somehow never investigated for murder. A school scoreboard that is literally revered because it killed a girl 20 years ago. A teenage boy who dresses up like a Nazi. The characters, also, are somewhat unrealistic. However, the unreliability of the book goes beyond Alex's schizophrenic narration – the plot itself is bizarre and not what I would call realistic. That adds great interest to the book and made me read carefully to make sure I didn't miss anything. One of the best parts of this book is that I, as the reader, simply did not know what was real. She attempts to unravel the mysteries at her new school while unraveling the hold her hallucinations have on her life. In order to keep her perceptions based in reality, she takes her medication and photographs everything around her, relying on the photographs to represent reality.Īlex navigates her senior year of high school at a new school, with a new crush, a new job, and a new principal who is possibly murderous. Alex has schizophrenia, complete with detailed visual hallucinations. This is a YA detective story with a twist: the sleuth, high school senior Alex Ridgemont, can't tell when a clue is real.

Made you up zappia