Review: Every Last Word by Tamara Ireland Stone

Title: Every Last Word
Author: Tamara Ireland Stone
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Release date: June 16th 2015
Source: Netgalley
Format: eARC

Rating: 4.5/5

Buy on: Amazon | B&N | BookDepository

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 like contemporary books that address difficult issues or issues with which I am not familiar, so when I read that the main character of this book has a mental disorder, I knew I had to read it.

Samantha belongs to popular crowd and on the outside she always looks perfect, but she has a secret that no one outside her family knows, she has Purely-Obsessional OCD, making her thoughts out of control and sometimes can be dark, so the day to day is a constant struggle to pretend to be normal and avoid at all costs that someone find out that she must visit a psychiatrist weekly and takes pills to control her thoughts and to sleep because her brain does not disconnect easily.

On her first day back at school she meets Caroline, a scruffy, frank and different from her lifelong "friends" and is through this girl that Samantha comes upon the Poet's Corner, which is a hidden room in the basement of her high school, that few know and she loves at first sight, because the attendees are an eclectic group of students that meet twice a week to read poetry written by them and no one is judged by it, where through poetry they say their fears, joys, sufferings and whatever they say it stays there, which is liberating for Sam. It´ss also there where Samantha meets AJ a guy who plays guitar, writes poetry and is her romantic interest.

Something that I liked is that Sam's mom is present through the story because she really helps to control her condition and she´s there to support her when she needs it. It's good to read about parents in a positive way, because usually they are absent or antagonists in YA books.

Every Last Word is a very good book about a girl struggling with her mental disorder and how she must learn to live with it. The plot is very well written and I was hooked from start to finish, plus it has a twist that I didn´t see coming and I loved the ending.