Addie loves nothing more than curling up on the couch with her dog, Duck, and watching The Great British Baking Show with her mom. It’s one of the few things that can help her relax when her OCD kicks into overdrive. She counts everything. All the time. She can’t stop. Rituals and rhythms. It’s exhausting.

When Fitz was diagnosed with schizophrenia, he named the voices in his head after famous country singers. The adolescent psychiatric ward at Seattle Regional Hospital isn’t exactly the ideal place to meet your soul mate, but when Addie meets Fitz, they immediately connect over their shared love of words, appreciate each other’s quick wit, and wish they could both make more sense of their lives.

Fitz is haunted by the voices in his head and often doesn’t know what is real. But he feels if he can convince Addie to help him escape the psych ward and everything will be okay. If not, he risks falling into a downward spiral that may keep him in the hospital indefinitely.

Waiting for Fitz is a story about life and love, forgiveness and courage, and what’s necessary to let go and learning what is truly worth waiting for.

I want to thank Edelweiss for this eARC! I am constantly searching for realistic mental illness representation, as it is something that I have been fascinated by my whole life. It is something that is generally misunderstood, and though we have come a long way in the science of it all, people are still stuck with preconceived notions on how these disorders work; not knowing that they are as varied as the people that they exist in.

I loved that we followed a main character with OCD. The author states in his forward that he based Addie’s experiences on his own rituals and compulsions, and you can feel the truth dripping from Addie’s very existence. It’s not all washing hands because she’s afraid of germs, or checking that the door is locked twenty times or she can’t go to sleep, but instead she does the things she does because she’s afraid her family will die if she doesn’t.

As her symptoms get worse, she is sent to a hospital where she meets Fitz. The beginning half of this book is very light. To borrow a metaphor used throughout the novel; it is a mask of comedy to veil the tragedy. We meet a motley crew of young adults, all of whom are battling their own demons.

We watch Addie navigate through her new surroundings and watch her use jokes and laughter to distance herself from the truth of what’s happening to her. As events unfold, this mask falls away; not only from Addie, but from the book itself. It gets much darker as we delve into Fitz’s past, and see the truly ugly side of his disorder: schizophrenia.

I loved the usage of theatre in this novel as well. We are presented with Samuel Beckett’s play ‘Waiting for Godot’, which is a good parallel for this story, and life itself. We are all waiting for something to make sense of our lives, and the mundane rituals that we all find ourselves in. We may or may not find it, and sometimes that uncertainty brings us to our breaking point. I think the greatest message of this story is to never give up; not on others and most importantly, not on yourself.

5/5 stars