Merry Wanderer of the Night [Search results for Psych] 

I bet a lot of you thought I gave up on blogging. Well psych! Midterms are over and I am back. I actually got quite a bit of reading done during my blogging hiatus, three books to be exact. You can expect upcoming review of Dawn of the Dreadfuls, Aurora Floyd, and Emma Volume Three. I'm part of the Creation of Eve TLC Book Tour this week though, so I will have a review of that up on Thursday. I need to read Creation of Eve right now and I'm really looking forward to it, but the evil, evil Books on the Nightstand (not really evil, love them!) has got me all interested in The Lighting Thief. From what I've heard about it, it seems like the new Harry Potter. I got the first book today and it is all I can do from tearing it open right now.

What makes not reading The Lightning Thief even more difficult is that I am leaving for New York tomorrow. Which means lots of time in the airport and lots of time on planes. One of my favorite things to do while I travel is read, which I gather is not the case for everyone. My parents always return to the story about our trip to Hawaii in which I spent the majority of the trip deeply involved with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. My favorite Harry Potter book in case you were wondering. For me, vacations are one of the few times I can really relax while I read. I don't have to think about what else I should be doing because I shouldn't really be doing anything except relaxing and enjoying the new place. For me the book or books I read on a trip is an integral part of the experience.

I love to travel and experience different cultures, but I also look at trips as a chance for me to do things I don't normally get to do. Like really lose myself in a book. Sometimes it doesn't work out and I get zero reading done on vacation, but usually I at least try to make an attempt. So how about you? Do you enjoy reading on trips, or is that one of the times you don't read? What are some of your all time favorite trip reads?

I have my Bachelors Degree in Psychology, so anytime I come across a book that deals with Psychological disorders or is billed/marketed as 'psychological' my inner Psych nerd perks up and says 'Want'. So, when I heard about A Scary Scene in a Scary Movie by Matt Blackstone I was excited to read it and see what it had to offer.

A Scary Scene takes on the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) something that has become very, very prevalent in YA lit. (I'm working really hard to hold my tongue here... Come back in September and I'll have more to say on that.) Rene, our main character, is 14 and faces his OCD everyday.

Now, even though my degree is in Psychology, I do not claim to be an expert or capable of diagnosis. Rene has a bunch of different compulsions. He smells his hand when he's nervous, washes them regularly, can't function or move if the numbers of time add up to 13, because it's unlucky and more. And, whenever he gets to feeling really anxious or stressed or intensely emotional, he equates the feeling with 'a scary scene in a scary movie'. The book is about Rene, his struggles with OCD and how he tries to cope.

One thing I really liked about the way Blackstone tackled OCD here is that he doesn't sugar coat it. Far too many YA books out there right now use OCD as a way to add instant depth to an otherwise perfect character. It's a way to give them a disorder but still make them a viable and attractive love interest without actually giving them a completely debilitating illness. But that is an unfair portrayal of OCD. While OCD isn't as serious an illness as something like Paranoid Schizophrenia but it is still a serious problem for those who suffer from it. We joke in our culture that someone who uses a lot of Germ-X or is highly organized is OCD and we laugh about it. But OCD is something that is so much more than that, so much worse and I think a lot of authors do those suffering from OCD a disservice by making it a character trait instead of an illness.

OCD is classified as an anxiety disorder. A Scary Scene is one of the few books I've read that actual handles OCD as such. In other books it's an annoyance or an inconvenience, but in Rene's world it is something that consumes this thoughts, his attention, his focus and it interferes with how he lives his life. It's an illness and I can't tell you how happy I was to come across a book that treated it as such.

Although I thought Blackstone did a fairly good job addressing the more serious side of OCD, I did feel that there was something missing in this book. I wasn't quite sure that I believed in a lot of the characters and their interactions with each other. Rene has never really had a friend, his OCD gets in the way of that, but then Gio moves into his school. And Rene is fascinated by Gio and decides he's going to try and get to know him. Surprisingly, it works. They are somehow able to

Then the story kind of falls apart for me a little bit. I feel like Blackstone wasn't sure that a story about a kid dealing with the harsh realities of OCD wasn't going to have enough conflict, enough drama and so he brought in a whole story line involving his father, and New York City. This is when I kind of stopped believing in the actions of the characters, and when the story started to lose some of it's credibility for me. Perhaps there was more to the story that I missed, but I honestly believe that a story about a kid learning to deal with an anxiety disorder as severe as Rene's doesn't need to borrow trouble.

Overall, this is a book that I believe was worth reading. I'm glad I read it and glad that I was able to find a book that, for the most part, gave a more realistic view of how bad OCD can really be for someone living through it. I'm not sure how realistic I think the book is overall, but I can tell you that someone, especially a young kid suffering through OCD is going to act more like Rene does than some of the glib, 'casually disordered' characters we see in other recent books.

*Disclaimer: A copy of this book was received through the Teen Book Scene in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Giver by Lois Lowry is a reread for me. I originally read it as a sophomore in high school and I was pretty neutral about it. I don't think it was the type of book I was really in the mood for and I know that I sped through it really fast (because reading only 3 chapters a night in a book this small was torture for a kid like me) and I admit that I read it a bit grudgingly. I was never that kid that hated a book because I was forced to read it. There were a few books I didn't particularly enjoy reading, but this is the only one, in all my years of schooling that I remember not liking because they made me read it.

I read the companion novels, Gathering Blue and Messenger and I simply loved them. So I figured that I must have missed something within The Giver and I decided that I would reread it sometime. But, in the meantime, I will also admit that I claimed to like The Giver as much as I had liked the other two books, but I'm admitting now, that it wasn't true. Then.

Now, however, that's all behind me and OH MY GOODNESS! I'm sitting here, staring at my 15 year old self in shock wondering why on Earth I didn't love this book. Because it is amazing. Far too amazing for the words I'm going to use to adequately describe this book.

Here is a book that makes you wonder, makes you think, makes you question. It follows a young boy, Jonah is not quite 12 when the book starts, and the whole story takes place in just over a year. We watch as Jonah is transformed from a young, naive boy into someone who has wisdom and understanding thrust upon him. Most of you reading this review have either already read The Giver or I'm sure you've heard about it from someone. So, it might be that it's impossible for me to spoil anything for you. BUT I think the way Lowry has written and crafted this story is so important, so powerful and so impactful when read 'right' that I wouldn't want to spoil it for anyone. So there is a lot I'm leaving out, a lot I'm leaving for you to discover, or rediscover, as I did, all on your own.

You learn in the beginning of the story that the world Jonah lives in is full of structure, rules, regulations, and careful, careful planning. Every detail of their lives is planned by the Elders. Everything is meticulously planned and there are no deviations from this. They are taught from a very young age how they are to live, how they are to be. And no one questions anything, because none of them know any better.

The only question I have about the story is something I can't address in a review like this, because while not, perhaps, an actual spoiler, it does contain something of the story that I think needs to be revealed to the reader, one page, one thought, one memory at a time. I wish the idea of memory had been explored a little deeper in the novel but I find the idea behind it utterly fascinating. Definitely very Jungian though. Makes you wonder.:) (Any of you know what that means? Or am I the only Psych nerd: P)

So really, what I guess I'm trying to say here is that this is a novel worth reading and it is defintiely a novel worth reading again and again. I imagine that there is much Jonas can teach me, about life and what makes it worth living and about what I'm willing to sacrifice in exchange for comfort and whether I have the right to make certain choices for later generations. It's a book to make you think, a book to make you feel and one that I can already tell is going to draw me back for a reread again and again. It is not to be missed.