This book was about a boy who went through a series of mental illness and didn’t feel like he fit in at any point. He also felt disassociated from the people around him, and he sees things differently than everyone else. We also see how some people around treat him differently than he sees himself. His friends considered him a “wallflower” and he thought after being so close to his friends that being a wallflower wasn’t all that bad. He however, fell in love with one of his friends and due to never believing in being outgoing, he never took action in loving that girl. He instead wrote a series of letters to no person in particular but rather to some person who would understand where he was coming from. We see that he really just wanted someone to understand him when he really didn’t even understand himself.
This book was written in a series of letters. At first the way it was written tripped me up because I never really get into stories that are written in letter format because I always felt that the letters took away from the real meaning of the story. However, this story never really lost my attention. It was formatted well in a way that didn’t lose me and each entry of the letters lead into the next entry well. We also got to get a lot more from the boy himself with it structured in the form of letters because his mind is directly reflected through the words. I felt the deconstruction of his mind and the way he started realizing what was really wrong with him. I see that before the end of the book he really didn’t understand what was wrong with him and he found it weird when his psychiatrist always asked him about his past, but later on he realized the full extent to why his past was so important. It didn’t really feel like a “Dear Diary” thing but rather a reflection on events that made him realize how disassociated from the world around him.
By the end of this book I was feeling so emotionally connected to the book that I really didn’t want it to end. I think that the idea of the book set on teenagers and a boy feeling the way he did about the people around him and himself made it so relateable. There is a lot of mental illness happening and different reasons as to why those mental diseases are caused. I love the idea behind this story and I believe that everyone should read this at some point in their lives. There is so much meaning behind the words that are written and it honestly changed the way i thought about mental illness and disassociation in general. The ending had me awestruck and wondering who those letters were written to and what they were meant to capture. I think that by the end of the book he reveals the reason he is the way he is but only in a way that he finally realizes it himself.
