Review: OVER YOU by Amy Reed

Toxic friendships are a very real thing.  Which is part of why I really loved OVER YOU by Amy Reed.  Unlike the title might suggest, this isn’t a story of getting over a boy, but finding one’s own identity despite the best friend who can’t seem to let you be yourself.

Simon Pulse, June 2013.

The first half of OVER YOU is told in second person.  The protagonist, Max, narrates to her best friend, the spontaneous and adorable Sadie.  And Sadie is Max’s world.  Max doesn’t seem to know how this happened, but they’ve been best friends for so long, and Max needs to be Sadie’s friend because Sadie can’t survive without Max.  So when Sadie decides to go live with her absentee mom at a commune in the middle of nowhere for the summer, Max goes along.  And it’s not long before things start to change.

First, there’s the fact that Sadie’s mom manages to still be kind of absent.  And then there’s the fact that Max is way better than she’d ever imagined at connecting with people.  Like Dylan.  Dylan for whom Max is falling hard.  Max isn’t used to getting the guy.  And Sadie isn’t used to not getting what she wants.  These girls are about to hit an obstacle that neither of them expected, but which both of them desperately need.

Amy Reed‘s elegant prose is the perfect vessel for a story that so many real life girls experience, and one that needs to be told as much as the characters in OVER YOU needed to experience in the novel. This is a book that I’m hoping to see on lots of “must read” lists, both informal and authoritative.  Amy Reed is a genius, and I can’t wait to see what she does next.