Suicide Notes by Michael Thomas Ford

Published: October 14th, 2008

“I’m not crazy. I don’t see what the big deal is about what happened. But apparently someone does think it’s a big deal because here I am. I bet it was my mother. She always overreacts.

Fifteen-year-old Jeff wakes up on New Year’s Day to find himself in the hospital. Make that the psychiatric ward. With the nutjobs. Clearly, this is all a huge mistake. Forget about the bandages on his wrists and the notes on his chart. Forget about his problems with his best friend, Allie, and her boyfriend, Burke. Jeff’s perfectly fine, perfectly normal, not like the other kids in the hospital with him. Now they’ve got problems. But a funny thing happens as his forty-five-day sentence drags on: the crazies start to seem less crazy.

Compelling, witty, and refreshingly real, Suicide Notes is a darkly humorous novel from award-winning author Michael Thomas Ford that examines that fuzzy line between “normal” and the rest of us.”

Review:

Jeff is not crazy. He’s not sure why he’s in a psychiatric ward of a hospital. After sitting in with meetings of the other members of the ward, he really knows he’s not crazy. So why is he here? He must stay 45 days for treatment since he tried to commit suicide.

This book had a very interesting standpoint. I enjoyed this book, but I felt like I was reading the same chapter over and over again. It wasn’t until the end of the book that it became strong and won me over. I hate when that happens because I have to drop my rating. Finding out what actually happened in the end, and how everything adjusted, was very good. I wish it was that good throughout the book.

The characters in this book weren’t my favorite either. There were a few that I didn’t like and then later in the book, I actually found to be good people. This shows good character development and I love that in a book. If I can switch back and forth from hating to loving and back to hating again, the author did a good job.

I really expected a lot more out of this book and I’m sad that I can’t give it a higher rating.

Rating: ★★★