A review by eesh25
Highly Illogical Behavior by John Corey Whaley

4.0

4.5 Stars

This book is about sixteen-year-old Solomon who is agoraphobic and hasn't left his house in three years. But he's fine with it. Then comes Lisa, who wants to get into the university with the second-best psychology program in the country and she has to write about her own experience with mental illness. For that, she plans to "fix" Solomon.

Obviously, things don't go exactly as planned because let's be honest, the plan to "fix" a human being as if the guy's some broken toaster has 'sociopathic' written all over it. Not that Lisa is a sociopath. Though she comes pretty close at times.

Lisa is not the most likable person. She's confident and determined but can also be very insensitive, manipulative and self-centered. I was always jumping between being amused by her thinking and feeling she needed therapy. But she was plenty interesting.

Another character was her boyfriend, Clark. He also became friends with Solomon and they both became pretty close. Close enough for it to bother Lisa. But Clark was a really nice guy and I liked how he got along with Sol.

Then there was Sol himself. I liked him very much. His relationship with his parents, how he tackled life as someone terrified to go outside and how he rarely made apologies for who he was. Sure, he sometimes felt guilty that he was upsetting his parents, but he didn't kill himself trying to make them happy. He was good guy, was considerate, funny, smart, mature for his age, and also cared about himself. Great protagonist.

Basically, all the characters were good. And I loved how the book gave importance to Sol's family as well and how they were a huge part of the book.

The book was pretty short and there was never a dull moment. I loved the story. The writing was good but it was very hard to tell the two perspectives apart and the narrative sounded a bit young; not entirely YA. That was one of the two main problems I has with the book.

The other was Lisa and Clark's relationship. I didn't really see 'love' between them and their relationship could've been better developed. I also wanted a teeny tiny bit more of a resolution for Lisa.
But overall, this was a really good read and I highly recommend checking it out.

I'm gonna leave with a quote from the book. Lines I really liked:

"He was afraid of the world, afraid it would find a way to swallow him up. But, maybe everyone was sometimes. Maybe some people can just turn it off when they need to."