Room Empty by Sarah Mussi
Series: standalone
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Expected publication: April 6th, 2017
Genres: YA, Contemporary
Pages: 304
Format: ARC
Buy: Book Depository | Amazon
* Received this copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you very much! This doesn’t affect the review in any way. My opinions are, as always, my own.*
Fletcher and Dani are fighting their own inner demons just to stay alive. Dani is ravaged by anorexia and hasn’t eaten for days. Fletcher is fighting to stay off the streets and to stay off drugs. Will their attraction to each other save or destroy them?
Both patients at the Daisy Bank Rehab Centre, Fletcher wants to help Dani find out about the Room Empty at the heart of her pain: What happened to Dani in that room when she was four? Whose is the dead body that lies across the door? Why won’t her mind let her remember?
As Dani and Fletcher begin to learn how to love, Sarah Mussi weaves an intoxicating story of pain, fear and redemption.
This book was quite a difficult read. It was probably the heaviest book I read about mental illness so far.
The book touches subjects like abuse, drugs, anorexia and suicide. And it takes them from the perspective of an anorectic girl named Dani at a Rehab Center. Dani and Fletcher, a drug addict, are recover buddies, and they help each other through their recovery process.
At the beginning, I wasn’t really enjoying the book. Mainly because Dani is way drowned in her illness, and it was very difficult to relate to her. Her problems made her very negative, self-absorbed and sometimes even mean. So I do have to say that the author made an incredibly good job on showing how deep can something affect us! My heart was jumping by the end of the book.
We see Dani go through a lot both in the present and in the past. She revisits her past in order to understand why she is the way she is. What made her become so ill. And the same with Fletcher, he shows us his past and all the bad moments he had. But although their problems are very different, one of the biggest difference is that he knows them and Dani have yet to discover them deep inside her memories.
We see a lot of good and bad moments. We go through denial to friendship, to understatement, to acceptance. We see the characters change and evolve and battle their inner demons.
I really liked how the book was arranged in steps and it had some incredible twists and a lot of emotion! But I had a lot of problems about how the rehab worked…
This is the type of book I can’t really recommend to persons that suffered or still suffer from any of the problems previously mentioned, as it can be a trigger. The book takes a lot of mental strength to get through, but the end made it worth it.
What’s your favorite book featuring some kind of mental illness?
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