BOOK REVIEW: Somebody Up There Hates You

SUTHY has landed me here in this hospice, where we―that’s me and Sylvie―are the only people under thirty in the whole place, sweartogod. But I’m not dead yet. I still need to keep things interesting. Sylvie, too. I mean, we’re kids, hospice hostages or not. We freak out visitors; I get my uncle to sneak me out for one insane Halloween night. Stuff like that. And Sylvie wants to make things even more interesting. That girl’s got big plans.

Only Sylvie’s father is so nuclear-blasted by what’s happened to his little girl, he glows orange, I swear. That’s one scary man, and he’s not real fond of me. So, we got a major family feud going on, right here in hospice. DO NOT CROSS line running down the middle of the hall. It’s crazy.

In the middle of all of this, really, there’s just me and Sylvie, a guy and a girl. And we want to live, in our way, by our own rules, for whatever time we’ve got. We will pack in some living before we go. Trust me. So, let’s get to it.

Spoiler Free:

Seventeen-year-old Richard lives full-time on the hospice floor of the hospital, waiting for the day his body decides to give up or out. But he’s not the youngest one there. Fireball Sylvie is fifteen and believes her time there is only temporary. She dreams of the day she’ll be released back to normal life. Her pictures taped on her surrounding walls reminding her what that looked like.

It’s them to against the world, playing pranks on visitors, giving nurses a run for their money, but when Sylvie has even bigger plans the line between teenagers and hospital patients quickly collapses into something they never even thought would happen. They were only trying to do some living, before the grim-reaper came to take them up, up, and away.

I wanted to love this piece so much. I’ve seen a lot of talk online compare this piece to John Greene’s “A Fault in Our Stars” and although it centers around sick teenagers, the plot is very different and gives a different insights to the life within hospice. I liked seeing that perspective, yet the piece never felt like reached its potential. It often felt like a monotone read, with half-way developed characters.

Spoilers Included:

Here comes some spoilers.

Here, I don’t hold anything back.

Proceed

At

Your

Own

Risk.

You ready for it?

Like I said above, I really wanted to love this piece. I love the juxtaposition and heaviness a cancer or sickness book puts out against the inabilities of living the everyday pleasures of life. But this didn’t seem to tap into that very well. For starters, the book is in first person, always being told through Richard’s POV. With that, Richard is very withholding of details more than once and I believe the author thought it would be a cute way for a young boy to show the importance of those events, but it instead came off as the author trying to get out of having to write the harder scenes and address the heaviness they brought into the book. Because of situations like that, the book felt surface-level and monotone.

In addition to the skipping over of details hidden by Richard’s “secrecy”, the characters also felt one-dimensional and not fully flushed out. Sylvie especially seemed very cliché as the popular girl who is beautiful and also has that idealized bad girl mentality. I mean when she grabbed the cigarette from his grandmother I all about rolled my eyes. But with both her character and Richard’s it also felt very avoidant of the situation that they are in. I think at the end Richard gets closer to processing it, but it was something I thought would play into the plot and rarely was integrated. I was surprised since hospice is a ticking timeline type of circumstance. Even more, time was referred to often, yet I’m not sure a clock was even mentioned in the piece. Small symbols integrated into the story could’ve added to that theme and further push the conflict of it more. Without it, I often forgot the severity of the situation. Any sick child has a high severity and should be at the forefront, yet with them both being in hospice I never felt that they were any different than the children on the pediatric oncology floor with better diagnoses. All that to say, it felt like a missed opportunity to take the story to the next level.

Now, I very much disliked where the story was taken from part two and on. Essentially, Sylvie asking for him to do this act for her felt in the beginning transactional. Prior to her asking, the readers were not shown this relationship that they had. All the readers knew was the Halloween prank and that they were/are the only kids on the floor. Sure, that's enough to bond two people, but we never saw it. We never saw her calling his room or vice versa when they were alone. Or having Edward, his nurse, pass notes back and forth. It felt that we, as the readers, were more so told “hey this is what they’re feeling” instead of being shown how or why they would be feeling that way towards one another.

Nonetheless, Richard agrees to Sylvie's request. Eventually they have sex, he then sneaks out late that night without any suspicion that she was bleeding out, passes by her grieving mess of a father who doesn’t realize she’s bleeding out, and not until he wakes up the next morning with crusty blood on his sweats does he have any idea that something is wrong. Frankly, the whole scene was frustrating and again felt like another way for the author to avoid the awkward conversation of a hymen breaking and the awkward interaction between two young teens. Again, it felt like a missed opportunity. So, the reader finds out that she’s bleeding out, since she has no platelets in her system and it takes all day to finally get her stable enough, while her father beats the pulp out of him (a very sick, hospice-living child).

I could go on, explaining every detail, but it felt off, unrealistic and out of place since a relationship wasn’t built prior. It felt like the modern, sick day of Romeo and Juliet except we don’t know or witness the relationship prior. Must I also say, I’m not quite sure the name Richard was the best name for the main character considering the subject content with Sylvie being almost killed by intercourse.

I will say the ending of the book was the part that I enjoyed the most. It felt richer in detail and plot that any other part. I think this is because the author is setting the readers up to think that Richard is going to die before she wakes up and then we are left open-ended, but I did enjoy the playing with the physical inabilities he had those last few days and how they played with the real-world events. It did set me up to think he was dying and given the clearer sight that some people speak on before dying. I only wished we would’ve seen Sylvie one last time alive, but again that goes with my critique that there wasn't much building of their relationship and the actions surrounding it to begin with.

Hollis Seamon

Hollis Seamon lives and writes in Kinderhook, NY and teaches at the College of Saint Rose in Albany NY and at the Fairfield University MFA in Creative Writing Program, Fairfield CT. With only four pieces available for purchase on Amazon, Seamon focuses on the deeper human thought that our world has to offer.