This is a review of the audiobook.
SUMMARY/PLOT
Zelah’s stepmother can’t handle her OCD, so she tries to ship her off to a mental hospital. Zelah ends up in Forest Road House under the care and guidance of a lovely female doctor with some other misfits – an anorexic, a cutter, and a mute. There she learns to face her OCD and her abandonment issues with her father. This is a review of the audiobook.
CHARACTERS
Zelah is, from what I can gather, bi-racial. Her father is white and it is hinted her mother is black. Zelah has out of control frizzy curly black hair and needs to wash her hands and face 31 times, and jump over 100 times at the top and bottom of each staircase she uses. She is also a germaphobe and won’t touch anything without the assistance of a tissue. The doctor helps her overcome some of the more powerful ‘rituals’, although she’s not ‘cured’ by the time she leaves the house.
WRITING
The writing was decent, nothing particularly wrong with it. I enjoyed Zelah’s narrative voice. There was nothing really to stand out about it either. I liked the respectful way the author approached not only Zelah’s mental illness but the other kids at the house as well. I liked how it turned from Zelah having ‘rituals’ to admitting her OCD and trying to get it under control.
PACING
I took a while to get through this audiobook. I had to renew it twice. I think it might have been the pacing, because there wasn’t really anything big or exciting happening to make me want to return to the book. It didn’t feel like a chore to end it, and I did want to know how it ended up finishing, but I simply wasn’t in a hurry to get back to listening to it.
OVERALL
I think Zelah Green is a really good novel for a young adult audience looking to explore an ‘issues’ novel about mental illness, specifically OCD. I didn’t enjoy it a huge amount but like I said, there was nothing particularly awesome about it. It was kind of blah, but I think other readers could enjoy it.
4
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