Every Last Word by Sara

Every Last Word by Sara

    Every last word is a novel based around the mental health of a teenage girl who has severe obsessive compulsive disorder (aka OCD).  OCD is a mental disorder and a type of anxiety that affects many people.  It traps people into an endless cycle of repeating thoughts and behaviors.   People who have OCD have constant recurring thoughts, fears, and images that can become obsessive.  You can be constantly nervous, similar to anxiety, which causes you to act on some of these thoughts.  In some cases, the affected person acts on some of these thoughts because it might make the obsession of thinking about it go away.  The obsessive thoughts may likely recur, so it is only going to cure the anxiety for a limited time.  People can be aware of the obsessions and fears on repeat in their heads, but they can not stop it. 

    The novel is about Sam, a teenage girl who has severe OCD, but it is more obsessive than compulsive.  This means that her OCD is more in thought and she obsesses over things more than acting on them.  Her head is always spiraling through thousands of thoughts and scenarios.  In Sam's case, she is obsessed with the number three.  She has to do everything in threes and three is always so important that it's uncontrollable.  In the book, she will click an elevator button three times before stopping at her floor, or she will drive around the school three times in a circle before parking.  It gets so bad that it interrupts her everyday life, she can’t drive her friends to school because she does not want them to know about her OCD.  It goes through her everyday high school life and you get to see how her OCD develops and greatly changes through her life.