Sadie loves her rocker boyfriend Henry and her running partner and best friend Lucie, but no one can measure up to her truest love and hero, the dazzling and passionate George. George, her secret.
When something goes wrong and Sadie is taken to the hospital calling out for George, her hidden life may be exposed. Now she must confront the truth of the past, and protect a world she is terrified to lose.
I quite enjoyed this book, but it’s sort of hard for me to figure out how to describe it or what to say here. What I will say is that the blurb is not really a good indicator of what the plot of this book actually is about. The whole book unfolds while Sadie is being held in a psychiatric ward after wrapping her car around a tree whilst driving alone. Sadie was lost in a “daydream” and didn’t see the tree in front of her. Her daydreams are not really daydreams, though, and are really hallucinations — which is where a big problem with this book lies with me.
If you’re going to write about mental health, then don’t do a half assed job. It is important to tell these stories and have people read them, but mental health is not something that a character just solves on her own. Admitting the truth out loud does not mean you are suddenly cured — and that’s basically the sort of the message that this book ends up sending.
Sadie always knows that George isn’t real — she can admit that to herself, but she cannot talk about him to other people. He’s her secret — someone she conjures up when she’s alone and they go on adventures together through the halls of Hogwarts, through the closet into Narnia, etc. But it’s not just a day dream — George is real to Sadie; she can see him. She talks to him. When she disappears from reality, she is having conversations with him, holding his hand, kissing him. On the outside, when people observe her, she is talking to herself, smiling, making hand gestures. She literally loses contact with the human world and can’t even hear people talking to her – hence wrapping her car around a tree, or another situation, where she was jogging with a dog and left to “meet” George while on her run, and ended up running in front of a car and almost getting the dog killed.
I feel like all of this is important to say because it seemed clear to me that Sadie was having issues beyond just being sad and depressed. Having an imaginary friend is one thing, having hallucinations and vivid images and experiences is something else. Yet, none of that is ever explored in the novel, and at the end, she is released from the psych ward after only 12 days and with a prescription for an anti-depressant. It isn’t until the day she is leaving the hospital that she even admits to her doctor who George is and what he means to her — and it seems really alarming and wrong that a doctor examining her mental health had already decided to release her without even understanding the scope of her whole sickness.
At the end, Sadie decides that she is leaving George behind and that’s that – that’s how the novel ends. Except, that’s not how mental health works, and it’s disappointing that this is how the author chose to conclude her novel.
The writing was excellent and felt more mature than a typical Young Adult novel, but in the end, it kind of felt like a slap in the face to people who actually struggle with mental health issues. I wish someone who actually understood mental health issues, or made an attempt to, had written the novel.
Book Drunk 