[Review] Every Last Word - Tamara Ireland Stone

Title of Book: Every Last Word
Author: Tamara Ireland Stone
Publisher: Disney Hyperion
Publication Date: 16th June 2015
Language: English
Format: ebook
Pages: 368



If you could read my mind, you wouldn't be smiling.
Samantha McAllister looks just like the rest of the popular girls in her junior class. But hidden beneath the straightened hair and expertly applied makeup is a secret that her friends would never understand: Sam has Purely-Obsessional OCD and is consumed by a stream of dark thoughts and worries that she can't turn off. 
Second-guessing every move, thought, and word makes daily life a struggle, and it doesn't help that her lifelong friends will turn toxic at the first sign of a wrong outfit, wrong lunch, or wrong crush. Yet Sam knows she'd be truly crazy to leave the protection of the most popular girls in school. So when Sam meets Caroline, she has to keep her new friend with a refreshing sense of humor and no style a secret, right up there with Sam's weekly visits to her psychiatrist.
Caroline introduces Sam to Poet's Corner, a hidden room and a tight-knit group of misfits who have been ignored by the school at large. Sam is drawn to them immediately, especially a guitar-playing guy with a talent for verse, and starts to discover a whole new side of herself. Slowly, she begins to feel more "normal" than she ever has as part of the popular crowd . . . until she finds a new reason to question her sanity and all she holds dear.



I received a copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange of an honest review.
Every Last Word is about a girl named Samantha who has pure-obsession OCD. She’s quite popular in her school. She has four best friends who’s been friend with her since kindergarten. These best friends of her don’t know about her OCD. New school year starts when she meets a girl named Caroline. Caroline is different from her best friends. She doesn’t are what other people thinks and she often wears t-shirt with snarky sentence written on it. One day, Caroline introduces Sam to a place that could change Sam’s life. A place where Sam can express herself in a way that she never imagined before.
The main protagonist of this book, Samantha is a 16 years old with a serious problem. She doesn’t tell her friends, ‘the crazy eight’ about this problem because she wants to feel normal. She’s actually a part of the popular group in school, which makes her not want to expose her OCD more. Some people might think that this action doesn’t make any sense and seems immature. What I mean is having OCD is the kind of thing that you’d want to tell your friends, but I understand why she does that. Moreover, she feels that she doesn’t fit in with her group of friend anymore. Which makes her not telling make sense to me.
I’ve never read about OCD before so it’s intriguing to read about it for the first time. Though the OCD part itself is not the central point of this book, since it’s a part of Sam it kind of comes up a lot in the book. In this book, the patient-therapist relationship is depicted in a positive way. Sometimes in a book, the character would feel like he/she doesn’t need help from professionals even if he/she actually needs it. So the character would act mean and be all negative towards the therapist. While Sam and Sue maintain a healthy patient-therapist relationship that really helpful to Sam’s OCD. I appreciate that part of this book.
This book has likeable characters and is able to make me care about them. The poetry aspect is also interesting. I’ve heard before that poetry can be a way to deal with mental illness. Though I don’t read many poems, I did enjoy reading the poems in this book. The poems in this book are simple and easy to read even for a person who doesn’t read many poems like me. So there’s no need to skip the poem parts. But the simplicity of those poems doesn’t take away the in-depth meaning of them.
Overall, I like reading this book. The plot twist near the end of the book makes me like this book even more. It’s sad actually but very touching. I really recommend this book.


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