The NerdHerd Reads: Made You Up {by Francesca Zappia}

Title: Made You Up

Author: Francesca Zappia
Genre: YA Contemporary

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Source: ARC from another blogger

Reality, it turns out, is often not what you perceive it to be—sometimes, there really is someone out to get you. Made You Up tells the story of Alex, a high school senior unable to tell the difference between real life and delusion. This is a compelling and provoking literary debut that will appeal to fans of Wes Anderson, Silver Linings Playbook, and Liar.
Alex fights a daily battle to figure out the difference between reality and delusion. Armed with a take-no-prisoners attitude, her camera, a Magic 8-Ball, and her only ally (her little sister), Alex wages a war against her schizophrenia, determined to stay sane long enough to get into college. She’s pretty optimistic about her chances until classes begin, and she runs into Miles. Didn't she imagine him? Before she knows it, Alex is making friends, going to parties, falling in love, and experiencing all the usual rites of passage for teenagers. But Alex is used to being crazy. She’s not prepared for normal.
Funny, provoking, and ultimately moving, this debut novel featuring the quintessential unreliable narrator will have readers turning the pages and trying to figure out what is real and what is made up.

I loved this one so much. It was breathtaking, moving, and powerful. Books about mental illness are tricky because you have to pull them off well, portray it and the people with it correctly, and I think Zappia did a great job. This was an amazing debut and I will definitely be checking out her future books.

Alex has schizophrenia. She has just transferred schools, thanks to an "incident" at her old one, and is just trying to hold it together long enough to get into college. Her biggest goal is just to keep others from finding out about her illness. That is, until she meets Miles. I loved Alex. She's strong, and spunky, and honestly just fun. She refuses to bow to this "problem", doing whatever she can to manage her day to day life. She relies on so many things to help her distinguish reality. Her unreliability as a narrator made it that much more interesting because sometimes she doesn't know what's real and what isn't which means we don't either.

Miles is an interesting character. At the beginning, he isn't really the most likable character, and that's how he's supposed to be. But he's definitely interesting. Sure, he's kind of a jerk, but he also has his issues. Miles and Alex actually fit really well together, and I loved seeing them together. Both of them have things they're hiding from everyone, but slowly they learn to trust each other.

I think some people might argue that her parents were terrible, but I'm not sure I saw them that way. Yeah, some of the things her mother did (or didn't do) were, frankly, awful. However, this book really shows how hard schizophrenia is on everyone involved. And I think this helps open eyes to how important it is to talk about things like this, so that people will know how to deal with it, how to help.

This book also had me captivated the whole way through. There were definitely some twists in there that I didn't see coming. Not knowing reality from the non-reality made this that much more powerful. I think this is such a needed, powerful story and I loved every bit of it.

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