Zenn Diagram by Wendy Brant [Review]

What started off as an interesting story about a girl with an inexplicable ability to sense other people’s experiences through touch quickly became a generic YA contemporary novel.

Hello Me, It’s You [Book Review]

There will be days, months, and weeks where you’re in control, then all it will take is one argument, one bad day, one trigger to make you wonder if anything in life is worth it. It is though; it’s worth it every time. It’s always going to be one step forward, closely followed by two thousand steps back, but one day, we’ll find a way to make it. We will.

Hello Me, It’s You is a collection of letters written by different people who have experiences on mental health to their 16-year-old selves. The editor, Hannah Todd, was inspired to create this project after her first-hand experience with depression and anxiety. It is a book that reduces the stigma surrounding mental health.

One thing that is common among all the letters in this book is hope. Despite what the authors have gone through, they never fail to see even the tiniest slivers of hope and that’s very powerful. With these inspiring stories, the readers get to see how real mental health issues are and how important it is for society to acknowledge and understand people who are going through these problems.

The different insights from those with first-hand experiences with mental health issues are striking and eye opening. The way they describe how it feels and how they think other people see them feels all too genuine and raw:

What you are feeling is sadness beyond sadness and it’s so incredibly hard to picture any way to escape it. People who have never felt this way do not understand it, they will tell you to “get over it” or that you are “just being a teenager” or that “everyone gets sad sometimes” those people aren’t trying to be hurtful, they just don’t have the knowledge or experience that other people’s brains don’t work like theirs do.

 

That, I believe, is the most important thing about mental health – It hurts just as much as any broken limb or open wound; the only difference is that you cannot physically see it in its entirety.

The thing that I love the most about this book is how personal the letters are. You feel that they really wished their future selves wrote a letter when they were sixteen because it would have made such a huge difference in their lives. Their words would have been so helpful during their hardest times so now, they are doing this project for the 16 year-olds who need this kind of encouragement from people who know what it truly feels.

Both uplifting and inspiring, Hello Me, It’s You is an incredible read for those who are going through mental health problems, as well as for those who know a relative or a friend who needs help.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

 

 

 

 

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo [Review]

I never really dived into the magical fantasy genre before because I was afraid of how foreign everything will be; how I might not be able to understand and imagine the world created in the book. Then, as I passed by the YA epic fantasy section of the bookstore, I think I heard Leigh Bardugo whisper to me, “That’s because you haven’t read Six of Crows yet,” and after turning the last page of this book, I realized that it’s all in the way the author presents the characters, the world-building, and the plot.

I’ll Give You The Sun by Jandy Nelson [Review]

I was enjoying everything about this book up until the very end. What a shame.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins [Review]

The Girl on the Train features a mystery as observed by three unreliable narrators. The first one is Rachel, an alcoholic who suffers from extreme blackouts whenever she becomes blind drunk. She found out years earlier that her husband cheated on her with a woman named Anna, the second narrator. The third one is Megan, one of the key links between the first two narrators.

More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera [Review]

“From the shapes cast by the green paper lantern, you would never know that there were two boys sitting closely to one another trying to find themselves. You would only see shadows hugging, indiscriminate.”

Twenty-four pages in and I was already in love. Five stars can never express how incredible this book is.

My Heart and Other Black Holes by Jasmine Warga [Review]

This book is damn near perfect!

We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson [Review]

“We’re not words, Henry, we’re people. Words are how others define us, but we can define ourselves any way we choose.”

I felt like this would have been my new favorite book but something went wrong somewhere along the way.

Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman [Review]

 

The only thing you have for measuring what’s real is your mind… so what happens when your mind becomes a pathological liar?

Wow! This book is absolutely brilliant! I can’t even begin to comprehend how much work and research was put into this book in order to deliver and execute Caden Bosch’s journey with this level of intricacy. I dived into this book not really knowing what it’s about and hence not really knowing what to expect. But I was so pleased as I finally came up for air after turning the last page.

Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver [Review]

I did not expect much from this book because it seems like it is about a privileged girl living in the suburbs whining over her first-world white girl problems as she relives her death seven times. So, it was a pleasant surprise when the whole story completely blew me away.