I was very excited for this book the moment I first saw the synopsis. I find novels centering on the subject of mental illness interesting, and the title itself is intriguing. Honestly I know very little about the main character's disorder - schizophrenia - but learning about it was great. The book opens with Alexandra - or just Alex - standing in the middle of a grocery store staring at a tank of lobsters. She thinks that they look unhappy and that they want to be free. In fact, one of them tells her so - with the voice of a human. After that, she meets the mysterious Blue Eyes, a boy who volunteers to help her with the freeing of the lobsters. The scene is very cute, and it was immediately obvious that Alex was a child in the prologue. 
 I'm not sure if I've ever mentioned this before, but I love unreliable narrators. I love the suspense of not being entirely sure of what's real and what's not, and this book was full of moments like this. Alex takes medication for her condition, but sometimes she doesn't take her pills and really she could be imagining just about anything. Some things are obviously an illusion - like ladybugs with heart spots, for example - but other things, you're not so sure of. I really liked the relationship Alex had with her parents; you could tell that they loved her, but they were completely unsure about how to handle her, which is completely understandable. 
 Alex herself is a wonderful, charming protagonist. She's funny, she's quirky and she's very easy to relate to. I found myself smiling numerous times during her narration of every day events. I found her habit of carrying around a camera and taking pictures of things to be very interesting. I'm not sure if it was completely effective at showing her the difference between reality and hallucination, but I think it helped at times. The side characters of the novel were awesome, as well. Alex has some really supportive friends, and their games of twenty questions were cool. 
 I wasn't sure how to feel about the romance at first. Miles is kind of a jerk in the beginning, and even after he gets to know Alex, he sort of remains that way. He takes a long time to process normal emotions and is not the touchy-feely type at all. He writes everything down and will do pretty much anything to make a few dollars. He kind of grew on me, though, especially towards the end. The overall plot of Made You Up involved Alex's principle and his strange obsession with the gymnasium's scoreboard. I wasn't quite as invested in that plotline as I wanted to be, but I think it's because I was so invested in this book's characters. I just genuinely loved them all and wanted them to be happy. 
 Something else about this book that's really good? Sometimes the things you're pretty sure are real turn out not to be, and the fake stuff may not have been so fake after all. It's really good at surprising you. (view spoiler)[I never once suspected that the magic eight ball from Finnegan's wasn't real. But now that I think about it, maybe it was a subconscious way for Alex to cope when she needed answers to burning questions. Also, I never thought the snake in the school was real. Obviously there was that story about it in the beginning, but wouldn't other people have seen it hanging from the ceiling? Maybe it was real a few times she saw it, but fake at other times? (hide spoiler)] Made You Up is also the first book in a long time to make me cry. I wasn't full-on bawling or anything, but my eyes definitely got watery. This happened two times. The first time was when (view spoiler)[ we found out that Charlie wasn't real. Alex's little sister had been hanging around for the whole book, and I felt her pain upon discovering that her death was actually four years ago and Alex's brain just never accepted it, but rather kept up the illusion that she was alive and well. (hide spoiler)] 
 The second time was when (view spoiler)[ at the end, when Alex's hallucinations got so bad that she accepted she couldn't tell the difference between what was real and what wasn't anymore. Those visions of the bloody people were creepy, too. But my heart just ached for her, because I didn't want her to have to go to the mental hospital, while knowing that she had to for a while. (hide spoiler)]. For a good chunk of this novel, I was terrified that (view spoiler)[Miles was somehow a figment of Alex's imagination and never really alive at all. Thankfully, he was honestly and truly real. (hide spoiler)]. Made You Up has a lot of small things about it that made it great besides the fantastic characters - there's little pictures of lobsters in the beginning of the chapters, pictures of chess pieces and bits of Alex's magic eight ball questions. The writing itself was pretty beautiful, and I look forward to reading this author's next book. This book was awesome, and I'm definitely not making that up. 
 4.5 stars