Made You Up by Francesca Zappia Review

Sometimes I think people take reality for granted.I mean like how you can tell the difference between a dream and real life. When you're in the dream you may not know it, but as soon as you wake up, you know that your dream was a dream and whatever happened in it, good or bad, wasn't real. 

Made You Up is about Alex, a teenage girl who suffers from Schizophrenia. She constantly took photos to differentiate things whether they were real or just her imagination took places. 

Alex is quirky, she knows she has a mental health issue but it didn't let her feeling down. Instead, she is hilarious and just wants to be a normal high school girl so that there's no one at school knows her issue. 

Until she met Miles, a boy from her imaginary childhood event. An event which she thought only happened in her head. The exact event that trigger Schizophrenia comes alive. Was that event real? Was her imaginary boy back then really real? Or it's just another scheme her brain made up?

It was interesting to see things from Alex's head and wonder if they were real or not and it was beautiful and heartbreaking when you know what exactly happened. 

People say teenagers think they're immortal, and I agree with that. But I think there's a difference between thinking you're immortal dan knowing you can survive. Thinking you're immortal leads to arrogance, thinking you deserve the best. Surviving means having the worst thrown at you and being able to continue on despite that. It means striving for what you want most, even when it seems out of your reach, even when everything is working against you.

I seldom pick a mental illness book, not because I'm an ignorant but because most of the books with mental illness topic tend to have a darker and melancholy vibe and I'm an HEA person. 

But in this book, the author describes the darker topic with an interesting way. Despite her Schizophrenia, Alex still being a teenager we know. And together with Miles, she created a perfect harmony.

Are you real?" I asked."Yes, I am," he said resolutely. He pressed my hand harder to his chest. His heart beat like a drum."If nothing's real, then what does it matter?" he said. "You live here. Doesn't that make it real enough?

Rating 4/5 stars

Originally posted on my Goodreads page, October 14, 2016