YA Book Review: Made You Up by Francesca Zappia

Made You Up by Francesca Zappia

Seventeen year old Alex is starting her senior year at a new high school, and she’s not very excited about that. She got expelled from her last school, and isn’t crazy about the idea of students at her new school knowing why. Crazy is the key word there; Alex has paranoid schizophrenia and she works hard to decide what is real and what her mind is making up. To help, she relies on a digital camera, her younger sister, and a Magic 8 ball to help her determine whether she’s being crazy or relatively normal. All of this makes her one of the most unreliable narrators most teens are likely to meet in YA fiction.

At her new school, Alex meets Miles, a young man she knew in her childhood but assumed she had simply made up because the memory involves setting free live lobsters from the supermarket fish department's tank. Because of her previous expulsion, Alex works community service with a number of other students who are also making up for poor life choices. When Alex is targeted by school bullies, it’s these pseudo-friends who come to her aid. The stress begins to get to Alex; she believes she’s imagining a plot involving a school mom, the school principal, and the impressive basketball scoreboard with which the principal is obsessed.

Despite the seemingly heavy topic of mental illness and paranoid schizophrenia, first time (and teen) author Francesca Zappia has written a well-paced and, at times, very humorous story. Alex’s attitude is approachable for students, and as she begins to devolve deeper into her schizophrenia we both feel for her and root for her. The end of the story provides a shocker that many readers won’t see coming, and it’s a heartbreaker of an ending.  The pacing is a little choppy at times, but the tenderness of the story and the sympathetic characters (as well as the unforgettable big reveal) more than make up for any other issues.