'Every Last Word' is a lot, but in a really good way

4 stars

“I didn’t go there looking for you. I went looking for me.” My voice is soft, low, and shaky. “But now, here you are, and somehow, in finding you, I think I’ve found myself.”

For the people who feel like their thoughts might actually eat them alive: “Every Last Word” will hit you hard, right where it should.

Here’s all I have to say about the last quarter of the book: OH MY GOD WHAT ARE YOU KIDDING HOW DID I MISS THAT.

But really. It hits you. This book leaves an impact.

Samantha McAllister (OK, I really couldn’t stop thinking about sweet tea when her last name was mentioned) is a perfect, popular, pretty girl, but she can’t escape her mind, not even for a second. She is obsessive-compulsive, and she is prone to panic attacks and breakdowns because of her obsessions and compulsions. She spends time with the most confusingly awful girls (think “The Clique” but sluttier, I guess) and is just generally unhappy. She’s one of the most relatable main characters I’ve encountered in 2015.

But she meets Caroline, who shows her into a completely different world. One where people write poems on fast food wrappers or scraps of paper and perform them in front of each other in a hidden room called Poet’s Corner.

And through Caroline, through A.J., through all of the other lost souls at Poet’s Corner, Samantha comes to terms with the people she’d hurt in the past and the hurt she’d inflicted on herself by not living the way she wanted to. And she starts to write.

Watching Sam find herself and come into her own is a really great driving plot for “Every Last Word,” and it’s so easy to root for Sam and the musically-inclined A.J. It’s hard, however, to focus on everything at once. Along with Sam’s struggles to cope with her obsessive-compulsive disorder, she also has terrible friend-bullies, a relationship she has to struggle to figure out and her own hesitations to open up with her new friends. It’s a lot of problems at once, and while they all intertwine, it’s a lot to keep up with in one book.

And then, of course, there’s THE BIG ONE. I refuse to spoil the big twist in “Every Last Word,” but it just added to the pile of things that made me wonder, “How can anyone keep up with all of this?”

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