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4.11 AVERAGE
4.11 AVERAGE
Somewhere between four and five stars. I've never read about bipolar disorder before, and honestly I know so little about it, so this was eye-opening. Michael was awesome. Everyone was awesome. Except Riley. She was the one thing that I just didn't really get about this book. But all in all, a very emotional, educational, and enjoyable book.
i bought this book when i saw it on the shelf of a barnes and noble—i’m not kidding you—when it came out in 2016, five years ago.
who knew that putting off reading it would actually be providential. i was diagnosed with bipolar ii in october, and have since been in a month long in-patient residential program, under emergency watch at home with my clinical team, been a guinea pig for med experimentation, and now i am finally starting to see a future for myself. i mirror the story of catherine in many ways.
while there are the occasional outdated/tone-deaf descriptors (as expected for a book by a white woman named karen), this book needs to exist and needs to be known. it tries, and the effort to be intersectional is clear as day, and i think that’s all you can ask sometimes.
i swear some scenes and sentences from this book were taken directly out of my life. this book made me feel really seen as a bipolar girl. the meds, the IOP, the doctor visits, the lurking thoughts, zero, the lying, the mom... all of it.
the last 40ish pages really got to me and made me cry a lot. and her character development was so important.
\\ LOWKEY ENDING SPOILERS //
the ending was not what i expected. i thought we would get more closure on her relationships with michael, kristal, and her mom. maybe even her clinical team. something like final dialogues in the time jumps or how her finally being honest majorly shifted the dynamics in her relationships. but, i realized that i think the ending is actually perfect. because her want to live, her new ability to see a future for herself—it is not because of any one person. it’s not reliant on her relationship with michael or kristal or anyone. if michael breaks up with her, it’ll be a stressor, but she’ll still be okay. if kristal turns on her, it’ll be a stressor, but she’ll still be okay. she sees a future that she never ever thought she could have. she has contingency plans. she has hope. and no person can take that away.
who knew that putting off reading it would actually be providential. i was diagnosed with bipolar ii in october, and have since been in a month long in-patient residential program, under emergency watch at home with my clinical team, been a guinea pig for med experimentation, and now i am finally starting to see a future for myself. i mirror the story of catherine in many ways.
while there are the occasional outdated/tone-deaf descriptors (as expected for a book by a white woman named karen), this book needs to exist and needs to be known. it tries, and the effort to be intersectional is clear as day, and i think that’s all you can ask sometimes.
i swear some scenes and sentences from this book were taken directly out of my life. this book made me feel really seen as a bipolar girl. the meds, the IOP, the doctor visits, the lurking thoughts, zero, the lying, the mom... all of it.
the last 40ish pages really got to me and made me cry a lot. and her character development was so important.
\\ LOWKEY ENDING SPOILERS //
the ending was not what i expected. i thought we would get more closure on her relationships with michael, kristal, and her mom. maybe even her clinical team. something like final dialogues in the time jumps or how her finally being honest majorly shifted the dynamics in her relationships. but, i realized that i think the ending is actually perfect. because her want to live, her new ability to see a future for herself—it is not because of any one person. it’s not reliant on her relationship with michael or kristal or anyone. if michael breaks up with her, it’ll be a stressor, but she’ll still be okay. if kristal turns on her, it’ll be a stressor, but she’ll still be okay. she sees a future that she never ever thought she could have. she has contingency plans. she has hope. and no person can take that away.
I was supposed to have this post up hours ago, first thing in the morning, really. But ever since I finished The Weight of Zero, I'd open up my draft review and then just... stare at the cursor blinking.
With my apologies to the publisher and associated folks who were expecting this review to hit much, much earlier: How do you review a book like this, really, that gets you where you live, you know?
Lots of YA books try to tackle mental illness, from various POVs. Some of them get it right. Some of them are stunningly wrong in their portrayal, ignorant, even if the idea comes from a good place.
Karen Fortunati gets it right. She gets it so very right.
I actually had to stop reading the book several times at the beginning. Like, close the book, blink back tears, and put it away for a while. Read it a chapter at a time, then move on to something else. Cath's honest assessment of "Zero" -- the day her inevitable depressive swing comes back, the day she knows is coming where living will no longer seem worth it to her -- it was so real. Too real, honestly. I saw far too much of myself -- past versions of myself, maybe some future version of myself, who knows; the brain is a fickle thing -- to be able to push on.
Because even though I came out okay on the other side of my own flirtations with "Zero", and even though I assumed by the nature of YA fiction that so would Cath, I still felt my heart in my throat as she calmly, rationally talked about her meticulous plans to get out before her mental illness got her.
Cath's journey throughout this book is outstanding, and she's surrounded by a great cast of characters who help flesh out her world. You can see them all trying, in their own way, to help her, even when she's reticent to admit that anything is even wrong. In a world of YA books with absent or uninterested parents, Cath's mom's love and care for her was palpable, and the warmth of the family of Michael, her love interest, was such a nice change of pace.
I loved the slow development of everyone in the book as they all start to open up in their own time and reveal their secrets. It felt so real in a way that soul-baring confessions between people who have known each other for days could never even pretend to be. Nothing is simple, especially when you're a teenager, and especially when you're a teenager dealing with mental health issues.
If I had any complaint, it's that things wrapped up with too neat of a bow. The resolution of Cath's arc is satisfying, but I probably would have ended it a few pages before the author did, leaving the ending hopeful but more ambiguous. In a book that hits all the right notes about the "two steps forward, one step back" of mental illness, the ending felt a little hollow. I don't want to criticize it too much -- it's good for someone in Cath's situation to read something like this and think "she was able to manage her illness and have all these things" but I could also see it being a source of frustration: "she's so perfect, I could never have all these things". I don't know what the right answer is, really, but it was something that gave me pause as I read.
One more thing about me, and then I'll go. There's a line at the end of the book when Cath is talking to her therapist and they're discussing how she's doing now. "And," she says, after giving the run down of some recent events, "I'm reading again."
For me, at the worst of my depression, the worst of my moments with "Zero" as an adult, one of the things that bothered me the most -- not the dark thoughts, not crying for no reason in the bathroom or at work or on the bus, not being full of the desire to just never go home again, even when I couldn't completely articulate what that meant -- was the fact that I wasn't reading anymore. Reading was always such a joy for me and at my worst, I couldn't get through a single paragraph, let alone a whole book. Once I got the right combination of doctors and meds under my belt, I knew things were starting on the right path -- yes, when I stopped crying at the slightest provocation, yes, when I stopped wondering whether life was worth it, but also: I was on the right path when I suddenly, all at once, discovered my love of books again,
Anyhow.
This is such an important book. As a kid, I didn't have any books like this at my fingertips. I was a pretty well read kid, but if these books were out there, I sure had no way of finding them. I had shelves of books about teenagers dying of cancer, being shipwrecked, going missing, having adventures. I don't think I ever had a book that said "sometimes you will be desperately sad, but there is a way out". Maybe I still would have been too scared to say anything, but at least I would have felt a bit less alone.
Content notes: As can be expected with a book of this subject matter, there's frank talk about bipolar disorder (both depressive and manic episodes), self harm, suicidal thoughts/attempts, eating disorders, bullying, and OCD.
With my apologies to the publisher and associated folks who were expecting this review to hit much, much earlier: How do you review a book like this, really, that gets you where you live, you know?
Lots of YA books try to tackle mental illness, from various POVs. Some of them get it right. Some of them are stunningly wrong in their portrayal, ignorant, even if the idea comes from a good place.
Karen Fortunati gets it right. She gets it so very right.
I actually had to stop reading the book several times at the beginning. Like, close the book, blink back tears, and put it away for a while. Read it a chapter at a time, then move on to something else. Cath's honest assessment of "Zero" -- the day her inevitable depressive swing comes back, the day she knows is coming where living will no longer seem worth it to her -- it was so real. Too real, honestly. I saw far too much of myself -- past versions of myself, maybe some future version of myself, who knows; the brain is a fickle thing -- to be able to push on.
Because even though I came out okay on the other side of my own flirtations with "Zero", and even though I assumed by the nature of YA fiction that so would Cath, I still felt my heart in my throat as she calmly, rationally talked about her meticulous plans to get out before her mental illness got her.
Cath's journey throughout this book is outstanding, and she's surrounded by a great cast of characters who help flesh out her world. You can see them all trying, in their own way, to help her, even when she's reticent to admit that anything is even wrong. In a world of YA books with absent or uninterested parents, Cath's mom's love and care for her was palpable, and the warmth of the family of Michael, her love interest, was such a nice change of pace.
I loved the slow development of everyone in the book as they all start to open up in their own time and reveal their secrets. It felt so real in a way that soul-baring confessions between people who have known each other for days could never even pretend to be. Nothing is simple, especially when you're a teenager, and especially when you're a teenager dealing with mental health issues.
If I had any complaint, it's that things wrapped up with too neat of a bow. The resolution of Cath's arc is satisfying, but I probably would have ended it a few pages before the author did, leaving the ending hopeful but more ambiguous. In a book that hits all the right notes about the "two steps forward, one step back" of mental illness, the ending felt a little hollow. I don't want to criticize it too much -- it's good for someone in Cath's situation to read something like this and think "she was able to manage her illness and have all these things" but I could also see it being a source of frustration: "she's so perfect, I could never have all these things". I don't know what the right answer is, really, but it was something that gave me pause as I read.
One more thing about me, and then I'll go. There's a line at the end of the book when Cath is talking to her therapist and they're discussing how she's doing now. "And," she says, after giving the run down of some recent events, "I'm reading again."
For me, at the worst of my depression, the worst of my moments with "Zero" as an adult, one of the things that bothered me the most -- not the dark thoughts, not crying for no reason in the bathroom or at work or on the bus, not being full of the desire to just never go home again, even when I couldn't completely articulate what that meant -- was the fact that I wasn't reading anymore. Reading was always such a joy for me and at my worst, I couldn't get through a single paragraph, let alone a whole book. Once I got the right combination of doctors and meds under my belt, I knew things were starting on the right path -- yes, when I stopped crying at the slightest provocation, yes, when I stopped wondering whether life was worth it, but also: I was on the right path when I suddenly, all at once, discovered my love of books again,
Anyhow.
This is such an important book. As a kid, I didn't have any books like this at my fingertips. I was a pretty well read kid, but if these books were out there, I sure had no way of finding them. I had shelves of books about teenagers dying of cancer, being shipwrecked, going missing, having adventures. I don't think I ever had a book that said "sometimes you will be desperately sad, but there is a way out". Maybe I still would have been too scared to say anything, but at least I would have felt a bit less alone.
Content notes: As can be expected with a book of this subject matter, there's frank talk about bipolar disorder (both depressive and manic episodes), self harm, suicidal thoughts/attempts, eating disorders, bullying, and OCD.
I wanted to like this book. I really, really did. I love the cover and the summary on the book's jacket was more than enough to hook me in. But this seriously was the most unsatisfying, painful book that I've read in a while.
Being a bipolar teen in high school, I thought that I could sympathize greatly with Catherine and her struggles. I really liked the idea of having a character that knows what it's like to suffer from mania and depression. I loved that I might actually have a shot at good representation in YA Lit.
However, Catherine proves to be just another WebMD representation of all of the tropes bipolar people cannot seem to escape in the media. Her mania - although only described - could be chocked up to excessive spending and energetic cleaning. Her depression was being a zombie and attempting suicide. There was no character beneath the symptoms she so desperately was trying to embody.
To make matters worse, Catherine plays the victim so often that it's actually physically nauseating, and while I understand that that's part of her character "growth," it was Seriously embarrassing to witness again and again.
I really appreciate the effort of normalizing bipolar disorder and helping mentally ill teens see that they aren't alone, but this is instead a solid example of how to make them feel even worse about their illnesses (especially if they don't have pure love to ~cure them~).
Being a bipolar teen in high school, I thought that I could sympathize greatly with Catherine and her struggles. I really liked the idea of having a character that knows what it's like to suffer from mania and depression. I loved that I might actually have a shot at good representation in YA Lit.
However, Catherine proves to be just another WebMD representation of all of the tropes bipolar people cannot seem to escape in the media. Her mania - although only described - could be chocked up to excessive spending and energetic cleaning. Her depression was being a zombie and attempting suicide. There was no character beneath the symptoms she so desperately was trying to embody.
To make matters worse, Catherine plays the victim so often that it's actually physically nauseating, and while I understand that that's part of her character "growth," it was Seriously embarrassing to witness again and again.
I really appreciate the effort of normalizing bipolar disorder and helping mentally ill teens see that they aren't alone, but this is instead a solid example of how to make them feel even worse about their illnesses (especially if they don't have pure love to ~cure them~).
I haven't dealt with bipolar disorder, so I can't say whether this is an accurate representation of that. But it is by far an amazing representation of the depression portion. So afraid to tell anyone about her disorder, afraid that she'll reach the end point and leave them. This does a great job telling that story while also dealing with all the typical high school drama that makes a mental health disorder even worse to deal with.
This book was pretty intense. I feel as though the author did a really good job of describing the feelings associated with depression. Zero was intense, and I spent the whole novel feeling the dread that the main character felt.
I loved her relationship with Michael, and I loved how she followed Jane's journey. Everything meshed together really well.
I am going through a bit of a book hangover from another book and am thus unable to fully articulate myself on this book, but I really enjoyed it and I look forward to seeing what this author produces in the future.
I loved her relationship with Michael, and I loved how she followed Jane's journey. Everything meshed together really well.
I am going through a bit of a book hangover from another book and am thus unable to fully articulate myself on this book, but I really enjoyed it and I look forward to seeing what this author produces in the future.
This book stands above other YA novels I've read about mental health for two huge reasons for me:
1. The parent is PRESENT. Most of the others I've read the parents are nowhere to be seen and have no real idea what's happening with their kid. And there's often no real explanation for why. Cath's mom is here, very involved, and very concerned for her daughter. And Cath has an actual relationship with her mom. She's not just mad at her mom all the time; she's irritated and we see the interactions that justify those feelings.
2. Cath actually has FEELINGS. She's not just angry and distant the entire time. She struggles with guilt, joy, sadness, anxiety and more. The full spectrum of emotions one has when struggling with a mental illness. In other books I've read, the main character is just angry at everyone and everything, doesn't trust a soul, and refuses to listen to everything. Here, Cath struggles with guilt for putting her mom through the pain. She struggles with anxiety around other people knowing her diagnosis, as well as fear around the notion that Zero will come back. She doubts her joyful moments and has a hard time letting the happiness just be. We see her struggling to trust her therapist, but not simply shutting him down and refusing to listen. The story validates medication and treatment, which is crucial in these books.
1. The parent is PRESENT. Most of the others I've read the parents are nowhere to be seen and have no real idea what's happening with their kid. And there's often no real explanation for why. Cath's mom is here, very involved, and very concerned for her daughter. And Cath has an actual relationship with her mom. She's not just mad at her mom all the time; she's irritated and we see the interactions that justify those feelings.
2. Cath actually has FEELINGS. She's not just angry and distant the entire time. She struggles with guilt, joy, sadness, anxiety and more. The full spectrum of emotions one has when struggling with a mental illness. In other books I've read, the main character is just angry at everyone and everything, doesn't trust a soul, and refuses to listen to everything. Here, Cath struggles with guilt for putting her mom through the pain. She struggles with anxiety around other people knowing her diagnosis, as well as fear around the notion that Zero will come back. She doubts her joyful moments and has a hard time letting the happiness just be. We see her struggling to trust her therapist, but not simply shutting him down and refusing to listen. The story validates medication and treatment, which is crucial in these books.
so this book had a happy ending. even if that made it a tiny bit pat, i needed it. i can't quite give it 5 stars because i reserve that for beautiful writing, but i would give it 4.5 if i could. while it wasn't gritty, it was pretty spot on in describing the depression, the flat empty depression and the heart racing super power of mania--both of which are always lurking in the world of bipolar. the fear that anything can send you down the staircase. the fear that once you hit the bottom, you might start digging a hole.
that was only a part of what the book tackled. bullying, loneliness, outsider-ness, teenage angst, acne. even though these are all generally seen as teenage issues, i can tell you it doesn't necessarily get better with adult hood. (ok, maybe the acne)
so, even though this is ya and the characters are in high school, it rings true.
that was only a part of what the book tackled. bullying, loneliness, outsider-ness, teenage angst, acne. even though these are all generally seen as teenage issues, i can tell you it doesn't necessarily get better with adult hood. (ok, maybe the acne)
so, even though this is ya and the characters are in high school, it rings true.