When I wake up, all my friends are dead.

The first line of the book…….makes you want to read it right??

Be warned that this is, and has very graphic detail on drug addiction, if you are a recovering addict then this book could be extremely triggering for you, and you would be best to stay away from it until you are in a better mindset.

If you are OK reading this sort of thing, then this one is well worth a credit.

The story follows our MC Mickey Catalan, the narrator of this story, a young high school student that has a pretty good life, she is the star catcher in her Softball team and they are probably going to make it to the local history books with a win in a large tournament in the upcoming season.

We meet Mickey in the months before that hard hitting first line of the book, her and her friend are involved in a car crash as she is driving home from Softball practice, her friend damages her arm, and Mickey badly damages her leg.

She is obviously not able to play softball until her leg has healed properly and she is given a timescale for this, 12 weeks, but this is just before the new Softball season starts and she doesn’t want to be sidelined.

She is given medication (Oxy) for the obvious pain that she is in, but Mickey realises quite soon that if she takes more, then she can push herself a little bit harder, and will therefore be fit in time for the new season.

Unfortunately her problems are only just beginning, unbeknown to her, Oxy is is highly addictive, she is taking it for the pain, but she is soon not in so much pain, but still taking the tablets.

She begins to up her dosage as she becomes more and more addicted to the high, when she runs out of her medication she needs more, immediately! but her prescription shows that she should still have at least 2 weeks supply left, what is she to do?

This is where things start to go more and more downhill for Mickey, she buys them from someone, who then becomes friends with her, and introduces her to other people that can ‘help’

This book doesn’t pull any punches, it is brutal and dark, you see the slow downward spiral of Mickey, how she becomes disengaged with her other life and starts to slowly become a shadow of her former self.

This is a Young Adult book, but it really didn’t read that way to me, yes it is about young adults, but that is as far as the YA went for me. I think that it is an extremely important book, it shows that drug addicts don’t always look like the images that you see on TV, they don’t always end up laying in a park or a back-street somewhere, that can look quite normal and function just as well as you and me, and you would never know. It is only when the addiction starts to get out of hand, that the red flags and the warning signs start showing.

🎧🎧 – Brilliantly narrated by Brittany Pressley a new to me narrator, but one I will definitely be looking out for again.