Your Voice Is All I Hear (Leah Scheier)

I was the one he trusted. I was the one he loved, the only one who believed him, even when his own mother had locked him up and thrown away the key. 

And now, I was going to pass down the white tiled hallway, knock on his doctor’s office door, slam his secret notebook on her desk and make her read it, make her understand what he was hiding, make her see what only I had seen. 

April won’t let Jonah go without a fight. 

He’s her boyfriend—her best friend. She’ll do anything to keep him safe. But as Jonah slips into a dark depression, trying to escape the traumatic past that haunts him, April is torn. To protect Jonah, she risks losing everything: family, friends, an opportunity to attend a prestigious music school. How much must she sacrifice? And will her voice be loud enough to drown out the dissenters—and the ones in his head?

Pub Date: September 1, 2015 by Sourcebooks Fire

I received an eArc from the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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This book destroyed me! I really don’t know how to start this review any other way…

To be clear, this book is about how April deals with Jonah’s disease, and how his schizophrenia progresses and the effects it has on both of them and their families.

The beginning of the book is so cute, April and Jonah meet, and they’re both so starved for a friend and human connection that they cling to each other. Yes, it’s a bit of a case of insta-love, but I get it here, because they both feel like they don’t have anyone else. So things progress slowly but surely, and they develop a romantic relationship that is so cute and involves a lot of time spent with their moms.

But then the first signs of trouble stat showing, and because April is the one narrating from the future, you know before hand that things are about to turn really bad. I loved the narration, by the way… April sounded exactly like a loyal 15/16 yo girl in love. Her frustrations, her sense of loyalty and her feeling that nobody can understand her are typical of a teenager, with a not so typical problem.

The book goes from cutesy with come clichés, to downright gut wrenching, as we see Jonah going deeper and deeper into his paranoia, and April trying to remain loyal to her boyfriend, even when she doesn’t quite know if it’s the right thing to do.

The signs are all there though, and when the inevitable happens, and even though I knew it was coming, I still gasped and cried ugly. And then that ending… all things considered, it ended well, but my heart was just so broken by then.

Kudos to Leah Scheier, for creating this amazing book with such a difficult subject without sugar coating or romanticizing it. I feel like I have a deeper understanding of the disease now.

I cried a lot during this book, it played with my emotions pretty early on, and it kept pulling my heart strings until the very end. It was impossible for me to feel nothing, so, even though the story is not perfect, I can’t help but put this one as one of the best reads I had this year, because it messed with me.

Rating: 4.5 Stars

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