Calvin - Martine Leavitt

Calvin by Martine Leavitt
Published on November 17, 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

As a child, Calvin felt an affinity with the comic book character from Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes.

He was born on the day the last strip was published; his grandpa left a stuffed tiger named Hobbes in his crib; and he even had a best friend named Susie. Then Calvin’s mom washed Hobbes to death, Susie grew up beautiful and stopped talking to him, and Calvin pretty much forgot about the strip—until now. Now he is seventeen years old and has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Hobbes is back, as a delusion, and Calvin can’t control him. Calvin decides that Watterson is the key to everything—if he would just make one more comic strip, but without Hobbes, Calvin would be cured. Calvin and Susie (is she real?) and Hobbes (he can’t be real, can he?) set out on a dangerous trek across frozen Lake Erie to track down Watterson.

It's been almost two months since I finished Calvin and I honestly can't say how I feel about it, I guess the good outweighs some of the problems I had with it and I would definitely recommend to some people but at the same time I don't know if I really liked it. Oh, well, let's make a list and see how this goes.

• This book is super short, like really short, my eARC version of it had about 70 pages and while reading/thinking back on my experience with this story I don't think such a short amount of pages is enough to deal with such a hard topic as schizophrenia, it doesn't give the author the time to really make the reader, that don't know about this decease, to understand how it works and the whys. 
• But still, the part that I thought most suffered from this shortage of pages was the ending, it was incredible rushed. I liked that this one ended in a happy tone since there was so many times where I thought things were going down but, since it's written on a letter format, we just get some pages of Calvin telling us what went down and how he is dealing with everything and them boom it ended, I don't know if it was the way it was told us and not showed us or if it was the number of pages that had to fit such a amount of information but things felt rushed and brushed off. 
• The romance. When it comes to books about mental health I'm always wary about the way romances are portrait, never in a million years I'm willing to accept the love interest as some kind of savior for the mental health problems but in this case it kind of did happen that, but it didn't at the same time. Okay, this is problem the part that most confused me if I enjoyed this story or not, I'll try to make myself clear but it will be hard. So Susie, the love interest, does help Calvin while he is at his worst and her help is a BIG part of why he gets better, but at the same time they have a good relationship dynamic, yes she helps him getting better but she isn't the whole reason why.
• Also, I was so happy with the way the ending showed how important it's to get proper help, like medication and doctors, and how that isn't a bad thing at all.
• This was funny, like laugh out loud funny at a lot of scenes.
• Parts of it is written on letter format, but most of it is on a kind of script way and this made it even more quickly to read since is basically only dialogues.
• The plot is totally insane, we have two teenagers crossing a frozen lake on winter and is cold as shit and is dangerous and as crazy as that may sound they find things and people on the middle of this crossing, so yeah, it was quite fun to read about Calvin and Susie adventures. 

Overall the good is bigger than my personal peeves and I think that maybe if you're looking for a book about mental health that isn't dark and heavy, but light and fun while still managing to create good characters dealing with their problems they you have found the right book, but if you want a deep look into schizophrenia I don't think this will be your best shot.