Hitting close to home

 

The Existence of Amy by Lana Grace Riva is the authors first delve into fiction works, after having written a non-fiction self-help book about mental health. She sticks with the MH topic in this book and it talks about depression, anxiety and OCD.

There are all illnesses I struggle with myself. I’m lucky that through lots of working on myself and medication too, I’m on the milder end of these now. But I’ve been there. I will say that if you do suffer from these or would be triggered by them, then this likely isn’t the book for you. The illnesses are represented really well, but this also means that she goes into detail and that might not be helpful for some people.

With the actual book itself, nothing other than our MC Amy going to work, or not going, happens. It simply follows her. I think this was a brilliant decision as it lets the reader focus on what’s going on inside her head rather than stuff happening outside. By the end of this book, I actually felt connected to the characters and was wanting to find out more about them.

Full disclosure, I was sent this book by the author to review. But also full disclosure, sorry Ms Riva, I wasn’t expecting to love it. I thought it might get 3 stars, that it’d be fine and that’d be it. But I ended up really enjoying reading this book and honestly think it’s a good read. I’m glad I did pick this up in the end (she sent me it a while ago) and gave it a go!

What do you think of books which focus on mental health struggles?

OCD Rep All the Way Up

John Green is known for his YA contemporary novels, they cover a variety of topics but seem to have a similar plot line. I’ll be honest, that’s the same here, but there’s a different reason you should pick this book up.

In Turtles, the main character suffers from OCD, and the representation is so ridiculously good. I suffer from mild OCD myself, and no I don’t need everything to be clean, so it was so refreshing to see this done so well here and to actually properly represent the mental illness in a way that society seems to ignore.

Our MC isn’t easy to deal with, her friends struggle to not get annoyed at her quirks and weird behaviours and they impact every waking second of her existence. Sometimes they’ll go away and she can just be in the moment, but they’ll come back again and that bliss is shattered.

I 100% recommend this for brilliant OCD rep and if you want a typical “John Green” book with romance, character building and young people learning about the world then this is one for you.