3.75 Stars
Suicide Notes
by
Michael Thomas Ford
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.
~ My Thoughts ~
Who would have thought that I would be reading a book titled Suicide Note and laughing aloud? Well not me, that is for sure.
This book was good. It has been such a long time since I felt like a story had the power to shut out the real world and Suicide Note did that.
The story is centered around a topic that most people do not talk about, let alone read about. The writing, characters and underlying themes were overseen with perfection and realism.
Each character and their own personal story were a building block to making this story complete. I went from laughing to a lingering type of sadness that I cannot quite describe, while the characters shed their many layers bringing this story full circle.
This truly was a memorable story and as weird as it sounds due to the title and circumstances in which this book was written, a very enjoyable story. So much so that I want to backtrack and read everything this author has ever written.
Beautifully simplistic, heartbreaking honest Suicide Notes was by far so much more than I ever could have anticipated
~ Michael Thomas Ford ~
Michael Thomas Ford is the author of more than 75 books in genres ranging from humor to horror, literary fiction to nonfiction. His work for adult readers includes the best-selling novels What We Remember, The Road Home, Changing Tides, Full Circle, Looking for It and Last Summer, and his five essay collections in the “Trials of My Queer Life” series. His novel Lily was a Tiptree Award Longlist title and a finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. He is also the author of the Sickening Adventures series of books featuring popular contestants from RuPaul’s Drag Race.
As a writer for young adults he is the author of the novels Suicide Notes, Z, and Love & Other Curses, and under the name Isobel Bird he wrote the popular “Circle of Three” series. His work has been nominated for 14 Lambda Literary Awards, twice winning for Best Humor Book, twice for Best Romance Novel, and once for Best Mystery. He was also nominated for a Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Award (for his novel The Dollhouse That Time Forgot).
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