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A review by readershark
The Goldfish Boy by Lisa Thompson
3.0
I initially picked up this book because I was looking for OCD rep. I have OCD (though not the same subtype as our main character), and have been looking for good books written by own-voices authors. Un-schockingly enough, they're hard to find. There's no indication that Lisa Thompson has OCD, so I'm unsure if this is own-voices or not.
The quick and dirty: Twelve-year-old Matthew is trapped in his home. He has crippling OCD, the contamination subtype, which means he obsessively thinks about germs and contamination, and compulsively cleans because of it. He mostly watches his small neighborhood through his windows, until one day, his next door neighbor goes missing, and he might have just the right viewpoint to solve it.
What pulled me in initially was the premise. I'm all for mystery novels, and the fact that our main character has OCD was really intriguing. Even though I don't suffer from this subtype as severely as Matthew, I found it to be accurate to some degree, if not a little over-the-top at times.
The mystery was okay. I felt like the mystery was kind of just in the background versus the forefront, which is totally fine, I just went into it for more of the mystery aspect. The writing was quite slow and I felt my eyes dragging as I read it. Overall it was just kind of...meh.
In the novel, Matthew over and over and over talks about how it was his fault his baby brother, Callum, died. He says it at least once a chapter, maybe even multiple times, and it's supposed to draw intrigue. But we don't find out what happens until maybe the last chapter of the book, and it starts to become repetitive with all the mentions. Nothing ever really ties back to him thinking he killed his brother and it's just routinely mentioned at random points. I thought it would relate to the case, but it doesn't, it's just randomly brought up in most chapters, which makes it confusing and annoying to the reader.
What I did like was, at the happy ending, it's not just a "yay, I'm cured!" moment. Although Matthew does start to take steps towards overcoming his OCD and getting treatment for it, there's no magical solution for it at the end of the book, which I enjoyed. It can take years to overcome OCD that severe, and it would've left a sour taste in my mouth if he had just...gotten better all at once.
Overall, I didn't love it but I didn't hate it. I think it's definitely worth the read if you want a small insight to what it's like to have Contamination OCD!
The quick and dirty: Twelve-year-old Matthew is trapped in his home. He has crippling OCD, the contamination subtype, which means he obsessively thinks about germs and contamination, and compulsively cleans because of it. He mostly watches his small neighborhood through his windows, until one day, his next door neighbor goes missing, and he might have just the right viewpoint to solve it.
What pulled me in initially was the premise. I'm all for mystery novels, and the fact that our main character has OCD was really intriguing. Even though I don't suffer from this subtype as severely as Matthew, I found it to be accurate to some degree, if not a little over-the-top at times.
The mystery was okay. I felt like the mystery was kind of just in the background versus the forefront, which is totally fine, I just went into it for more of the mystery aspect. The writing was quite slow and I felt my eyes dragging as I read it. Overall it was just kind of...meh.
In the novel, Matthew over and over and over talks about how it was his fault his baby brother, Callum, died. He says it at least once a chapter, maybe even multiple times, and it's supposed to draw intrigue. But we don't find out what happens until maybe the last chapter of the book, and it starts to become repetitive with all the mentions. Nothing ever really ties back to him thinking he killed his brother and it's just routinely mentioned at random points. I thought it would relate to the case, but it doesn't, it's just randomly brought up in most chapters, which makes it confusing and annoying to the reader.
What I did like was, at the happy ending, it's not just a "yay, I'm cured!" moment. Although Matthew does start to take steps towards overcoming his OCD and getting treatment for it, there's no magical solution for it at the end of the book, which I enjoyed. It can take years to overcome OCD that severe, and it would've left a sour taste in my mouth if he had just...gotten better all at once.
Overall, I didn't love it but I didn't hate it. I think it's definitely worth the read if you want a small insight to what it's like to have Contamination OCD!