Written in journal format, we follow the life of Danielle Levine, a senior who has OCD and feels like an outcast.  Danielle loves to read and write and doesn’t like much about herself.   Her English teacher assigns the class a lot of writing assignments and we get to read Danielle’s attempt at them.  I say “attempt” because Danielle does get off topic but that is what I like about reading Danielle’s essays, we learn about Danielle and what makes her tick. We also get to see Danielle’s grades and the comments from her teacher, Ms. Harrison which sometimes is rather harsh.  Having OCD, Danielle knows that her life is different and she has accepted it and she tries to explain her thinking in her writing so other know where she is coming from.   She connects with her fun and crazy aunt and through this connection she feels accepted and loved.  When she watches the Big Lebowski, she realizes a lesson about life. 

I enjoyed reading Danielle’s essays and seeing things from her perspective.  I haven’t seen the Big Lebowski so I think that might be on my movies to view soon.  I do like the lesson she learned from it.  I don’t think the cover of the book gave the book the justice it deserved.

“There must be a better way to love and to live, a way to be a lover of things without attaching.”

I'll admit that I had a very superficial idea of what I would be getting from a book with a cover and title like OCD, the Dude, and Me. I mean, the girl is holding up a bowling ball over her face and "DUDE" takes up at least a third of the entire cover. All those expectations were very wrong. I almost feel like I should apologize they were so wrong. 

What I expected was a book like Sean Griswold's Head. It's cute, it's quirky, it's a contemporary romance that also has an emotional center, but is still comprised of all-american YA fluff. OCD, the Dude, and Me was not that. Instead it was an honest, sometimes heartbreaking look, at what it's like to be inside the mind of a teenage outcast as she hates herself and struggles to understand other people. Danielle is a lot like me. I don't have OCD, but I do have capital A, Anxiety. So reading her journals and assignments it all felt very familiar, which was very much a part of why I loved this book so much.

Danielle is over-weight and socially inept. She hates the color of her hair; She doesn't know how to accept her damaged self. She loves to read, and write, and journal every little bit of her life. However, I, Jessica-Robyn, am also all these things. I was surprised how emotionally connected I became to this book. It's like that one book that speaks directly to you in that weird, person to fictional person, sort of way.

A lot of the book is about emotions and high school. As Danielle experiences her last year of high school primarily though her English class we experience things with her. Danielle goes through a lot of normal high school experiences, like a class trip to England and a school car wash, but through her worry and obsessive nature she finds it difficult to cope among her classmates. She is a wall builder, a with-holder, and she has, as we learn, a pretty good reason to be that way. ... That I can't talk about.

There are so many aspects of the plot I want to discuss and so many things I want to say to try and make a case for this book, but the honest truth is that I can't talk about my favourite moments because it would spoil it. I'm not even willing to use spoiler tags because I know you people, you'll be too tempted. 

I don't know how this book is going to fly for other people, but I ended up loving it. Will other people also love it? I really don't know. 

So, here I am, between a rock and a hard place. I want to recommend this, but I don't know if I can. So let me just lay it all out there. 

I woke up late today at 4PM (yes, PM) because I haven't been sleeping well. When I joined my mother in the living room I sat down and decided to read because nothing good was on TV. It's been a very long time since I read a good book, I didn't expect this one to break the losing streak. But then I started reading OCD, the Dude, and Me, and did not stop until I was finished.

As a word of warning this is written in journal format. There's a lot of emails, Grade 12 English essays, and letters that ramble, meander, and leaves things out. With that said, this is the sort of story that should be written that way. It didn't come across as stiff or withholding, it felt like a very real person was laying all out there in her personal, private, record keeping space, fueled by her OCD, that sometimes crossed over into more public spaces. It made sense for her character and for the characters around her, which made it all work it a strange and wonderful, not patch-worky, sort of way.

I would recommend this book to psychology lovers and people looking for a very "inside-the-mind" coming-of-age story that reveals itself gradually with a lot of humour and a lot of heartbreak. OCD, the Dude, and Me made me feel that contradictory happy/sad that just leaves me wanting to keep this book and not give it back to the library. No seriously, I know there would be a fine, but how much would that really be? ... guys? 

Also, note to self, see what this The Big Lebowski is all about.

Going in to OCD, the Dude, and Me, I was expecting a fun contemporary read with a smart and sarcastic main character who would go through some sort of life-altering experience that would leave me content and with a smile on my face. In some ways, I was correct, because that WAS how the book left me. But I was not expecting to feel as many emotions as I did while reading Danielle's story, and especially wasn't expecting that several of the passages in the book would bring tears to my eyes. Calling this book a fun or light contemporary read is doing it a pretty large disservice, because there is a lot going on here, even if it is delivered with a quick, sharp and self-deprecating wit that makes you laugh ... right before it makes you cry.

Danielle is a very unique narrator. She suffers from extreme OCD, which she deals with through a lot of self-made coping mechanisms (not least of which is reorganizing her snow globe collection and trying on a myriad of hats). However, she also very clearly hates herself as well, putting down her looks, her weight, and the fact that she exists at all pretty much non-stop. The degree of her self-loathing is incredibly apparent to the reader, who experiences this book - and Danielle's story - via journal entries (or me-moir entries), emails between her and her aunt (and later, Daniel), letters from a pen pal, and her writing assignments for her English class. (The letters to a made-up mental health committee about her social skills class were the ones that made me LOL the loudest, I have to admit!) Because Danielle suffers from OCD, each of these entries is meticulously titled so that the reader essentially gets the story of Danielle's senior year in chronological order. My only complaint about this method of delivery was that the font used for Justine's letters was a little hard for me to read, particularly since it's a script font in a pretty small type size. Actually, that's my ONLY complaint about this entire book, which tells you just how much of an impact this story had on my personally.

Everyone in existence has at least one thing about them that they don't like, but for Danielle, the things she hates about herself far outnumber what she likes, which made this an extremely difficult book for me to read at times. I've read books that have characters who don't like themselves, but I truly believe that Danielle took this hatred to a whole new level. Some of her entries were so incredibly poignant that I had to put the book down for a bit to sort of wrap my head around the emotions this fictional character was making me feel. I don't understand mental illness, because I don't suffer from any form of it, and while there are definitely things about myself that I'd want to change, nothing is to the extreme that Danielle feels. It doesn't help that she is pretty much the butt of her classmates' jokes, the social outcast, and the one who is easily left behind. Her entire state of mind is just so incredibly unhealthy, and every time that fact was driven home for the reader I just almost couldn't deal with it. No one should have to experience what she goes through (and if I could have strangled Jacob, I definitely would have), and yet it's precisely what teens deal with every single day in high school, which - as a teacher - made it even more difficult for me to handle. But her story was so phenomenal, so incredibly well-written, that I couldn't look away from it and could only hope that she would eventually find some joy.

And I cannot write this review without at least mentioning Daniel. I don't know what it is about these contemporary debut authors and their fabulous best friend characters, but we have another winner in Daniel. He's quick-witted, surprisingly brash, over-the-top, and shocking, and yet I adored him from the very second he appeared on the page (and him telling Lisa off in class in defense of Danielle! Amazing). So much love for this stubborn, crude boy.

Honestly, I fear I am not doing this book the amount of justice I should with this review, so let me just say that I found this book incredibly difficult to read, but utterly worthwhile. Everything about it was just amazingly well done, from Danielle's internal feelings, to the ways the people around her tried to help her cope with what she was going through. There were plenty of things to make you laugh, and plenty of others to make you cry. And any book that can put a reader through those extremes deserves the highest rating I can give it, and I do so now without any reservations whatsoever.

***

 

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Recommended to me by the library since I've inhaled all the John Green, Gary Schmidt, Rainbow Rowell, etc. they have on the shelves. This one was okay and I breezed right through it in a couple of hours. However, it didn't have much depth. Danielle could have been an amazing character (as could Daniel, Aunt Joyce, etc.), but they were all left a little flat. My inner "Dude" did get a chance to come barreling out of the closet, so that was a plus ; )

Originally posted at yAdult ReviewThis is one of those books as soon as I started I couldn’t stop reading. It had been on my TBR list for awhile. I was lucky and got on the hold list at the library early and it came in just around the time a fellow blogger (and someone I harass a lot on twitter cause I want her to be my frand) Jamie. While I don’t always agree with Jamie, I see where she comes from when she reviews a book, this book it was easy to tell that she loved and adored it and that gave me hope.Oh did I love and adore this book. Told from the point of Danielle in essay and journal form, one comes to find out we all have a fe0a1c64beba11e2a2ab22000a1fb84b_7bit of Danielle in them. For example, Danielle’s brain works a lot like mine does, where it gets fixated on one thing and doesn’t let go of that. My brain does that extremely well. Which I understand not only says a lot about Danielle, but says a lot about me. I also related to her essay writing because she very much writes the way she thinks which often equals word vomit, something her teacher doesn’t always approve of for formal writing.Throughout her senior year Danielle goes through a tremendous amount of growth that is not only recognizable to herself, but to those around her. Danielle is hilarious, often without meaning to be, because she is so authentic and true to herself. As Danielle has OCD it is interesting to see how that affects her daily life, and it does, but at the same time she has a strong support system through Daniel, her aunt, and this hilarious elderly British woman.This book is not all light heartedness, though. Danielle goes through a growing period with “the love of her life” while at the same time dealing with the fact she is getting memories back that she once forgot.Roedy Vaughn has written a stellar debut novel. I cannot wait to see what more comes from her, because if it is anything like Danielle and her love of the Dude, I will be happy to read it.