Highly Illogical Behavior

Highly Illogical Behavior
author: John Corey Whaley
published: May 10th 2016
pages: 256
my rating: 4 out of 5 stars


Sixteen-year-old Solomon is agoraphobic. He hasn’t left the house in three years, which is fine by him.

Ambitious Lisa desperately wants to get into the second-best psychology program for college (she’s being realistic). But is ambition alone enough to get her in?

Enter Lisa.

Determined to “fix” Sol, Lisa steps into his world, along with her charming boyfriend, Clark, and soon the three form an unexpected bond. But, as Lisa learns more about Sol and he and Clark grow closer and closer, the walls they’ve built around themselves start to collapse and their friendships threaten to do the same.


Yay, I read book one of the BookTube-A-Thon Challenge! And I really liked this book too! I haven't read many books about mental health but this was definitely a good start.


The beginning of the book pulled me in instantly. There aren't any parts in this book that I found slow paced, if anything it was too fast paced. This is a pretty short book and I feel like it could've been even better if the story got stretched out a bit.
The only other thing I can criticize about this book is that the writing style seemed very distant and almost a bit emotionless in the beginning. As soon as I read a bit further though, I completely got sucked into the book and didn't have any problems with the writing style in the rest of the book.

Solomon is a character unlike anyone I have ever read about before. Sure, he has his mental health issues but besides that he's just a teenager, geek and someone who enjoys joking around. I liked that most of the time the book wasn't even remotely sad and just about a great friendship.
Something that isn't mentioned on the back of the book and took me by surprise is that Solomon is gay. I loved that it wasn't even a huge part of the book and every character just accepted it and continued being friends with Solomon. I feel like not that many books feature LGBTQIA+ main characters without the book being manly about their sexuality (at least not that many books I have heard of. Feel free to recommend me some)

Lisa on the other hand is a character I had mixed feelings about. It's pretty obvious that her intentions are good most of the time and that she isn't a bad person but at the same time she ignored that what she was doing was wrong and it was clear that the situation would at some point get messy, one way or another, it was just a matter of time. While I usually don't like books with a catastrophe in sight from the very beginning, it did keep me reading and I actually really liked that.

The ending was amazing. It was realistic, not the perfect happy end you see in every fairy tale, but it was still somehow happy. The author didn't try to sugar coat the situation of Solomon or invented some easy shortcut for him which I really appreciated.

Since I don't know much about mental health or anxiety disorders I can't say if it was portrayed accurately in this book but it did line up with the things I do know and it all sounded right, to me anyways. Solomon can't leave the house and Lisa tries to fix him. I liked that it wasn't too easy for Solomon to get better or even make any changes to his life because that just wouldn't be realistic in my opinion. The small changes that happened throughout this book where actually huge to the main character and reading about that was really amazing.

The friendship in this book was what made it the amazing book that it is. I don't know how to properly describe it but it was so natural and fun and just great to read about.