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ARC for review.

I really wanted to like this, and I certainly didn't hate it, it's just that it was FAR too long (nearly 400 hundred pages and could have been told in less than half that) and way too genre driven - it was decently-written and the plot showed some promise, but occasionally the plotting seemed to be done by an actual YA.

Callie is living with a foster family (she's been there a few months, but already her foster sister has become her REAL sister in her mind) after her mother is committed to a mental institution and her father disappears, possibly after kidnapping a young child and attacking Callie in some way - but Callie can't remember what happened and she's been suffering from graphomania since that night, and struggling to put the pieces together. So there's the general plot.

My primary problem (other than the length...I was afraid I would never finish) is that, while I know nothing about graphomania, the Callie described in this book is suffering from a serious mental illness, yet NONE of the adults "helping" her seem to realize this. I mean, Dawn uses it as a way to move the plot in that if Callie were an inpatient somewhere she couldn't run around playing detective, but I found it incredibly disturbing especially for a YA audience. When Callie has an attack of graphomania she actually blacks out and occasionally wakes up in completely different places with no memory of how she got there or what she's done, and she has multiple episodes each day. She decides that she doesn't want to take the medication that helps her (because it blunts her) and her foster parents, school principal and psychologist all allow this with only vague murmurings that perhaps she should reconsider. Anyway, I'm rambling, but I didn't like the message it was sending and I didn't like that all the adults were so useless.

Separate from that much of the book seemed very disjointed, the romance (I really hated John, a most unrealistic character, I thought. A girl he barely knows is suffering breakdowns right in front of him and he decides they are beautiful and poetic? First, that's insane itself, and second, I'm guessing most teenage boys would run screaming) and "mean girl" elements were a bit prevalent in a case where a girl is fighting for her sanity, oh and did I mention it was way too long. Perhaps with additional edits and some reworks I would have liked this more, but as is I can't really recommend.