07/12/2012
Francesca Zappia (ZapAdRem on QT) has signed with agent Louise Fury of The Bent Agency.
Despite being a paranoid schizophrenic, Alex Ridgemont knows Abraham Lincoln isn’t really chilling in her dad’s La-Z-Boy, communists aren’t really coming to kill her family, and the unbelievable little boy she met when she was eight just wasn’t real. Knowing these realities are all that keep her away from her mother’s mental-hospital zealotry and keep up her chances of getting into college and having a real life.
But when she transfers to East Shoal High and meets Miles Richter, a high-functioning genius and the douchebaggy, definitely-very-real incarnation of the little boy from ten years earlier, all Alex’s carefully conceived realities begin crashing down around her. Miles, the only person who can help her find the dividing line between real and not, has life-threatening problems of his own, and some of them are linked to Alex's schizophrenia. With or without him, Alex will have to pull herself together—or risk losing more than her sanity.
ALEXITHYMIA is an 95,000-word YA contemporary novel with psychological elements that takes something ordinary - the absolute insanity of high school - and shows it through the eyes of someone who is literally insane. It showcases the destructive effects of parents’ high demands on their children, and the fear of never escaping the expectations of society set on us as teenagers.