Connectedness

Many years ago, when I was in college, my now brother-in-law introduced me to a friend of his who had spent some time in a psychiatric hospital. Tom told me his friend thought he’d become invisible,  which sort of made me laugh. When his friend explained it to me, it wasn’t funny at all. I remember to this day that he felt that the lines connecting him to other people were getting so long he couldn’t be seen. It is an image that has stuck with me.

In Shaun David Hutchinson’s At The Edge of The Universe, the protagonist has a similar, though opposite problem. Everyone and everything else is disappearing and he is feeling more and more isolated.

Publisher’s Summary: From the author of We Are the Ants and The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley comes the heartbreaking story of a boy who believes the universe is slowly shrinking as things he remembers are being erased from others’ memories.

Tommy and Ozzie have been best friends since the second grade, and boyfriends since eighth. They spent countless days dreaming of escaping their small town—and then Tommy vanished.

More accurately, he ceased to exist, erased from the minds and memories of everyone who knew him. Everyone except Ozzie.

Ozzie doesn’t know how to navigate life without Tommy, and soon he suspects that something else is going on: that the universe is shrinking.

When Ozzie is paired up with new student Calvin on a physics project, he begins to wonder if Calvin could somehow be involved. But the more time they spend together, the harder it is for him to deny the feelings developing between them, even if he still loves Tommy.

But Ozzie knows there isn’t much time left to find Tommy—that once the door closes, it can’t be opened again. And he’s determined to keep it open as long as it takes to get his boyfriend back.

This is another excellent YA novel dealing with mental illness, and it brings with it the hope for treatment and recovery.