Beautifully written, stunningly heartbreaking, and utterly captivating, Your Voice Is All I Hear is a breakthrough in YA literature. To say this book rendered me completely speechless is an understatement. After I read the final page, I sat there for a few minutes, my head reeling with the intensity of the book I'd just finished and a thousand other indefinable emotions. 
 The story follows a teenage girl, April Wesley, who is reluctant to go back to her school, Fallstaff High, after she finds out that her best (and only) friend Kristin is transferring to a private school. But then she meets the attractive new boy, Jonah Golden. Jonah and April soon grow very close and before anyone knows it, they're a couple and officially dating. April, who thinks she's a plain Jane and finds herself completely unattractive, is ecstatic that she finally has a boyfriend - especially when it's the boy she's been crushing on. Her life should now be blissful and filled with happiness - but then Jonah starts behaving strangely. As he slips into a dark depression, trying to escape the traumatic past haunting him, April is torn. When Jonah is diagnosed with schizophrenia, April is devastated - but she still clings determinedly to the small hope that he will come back to her. To protect Jonah, she risks losing everything: friends, her family, an opportunity to attend a prestigious music school. However, because April loves Jonah, she decides to stand by him, even humoring him by stepping into his delusional world and doing what he asks of her. But will her voice, the only one he trusts now, be enough to drown out the dissenters - and the ones in his head? 
 I was the one he trusted. I was the one he loved, the only one who believed him, even when his own mother had locked him up and thrown away the key. 
 And now, I was going to walk down the white-tiled hallway, knock on his doctor's office door, slam his secret notebook on her desk, and make her read it, make her understand what he was hiding, make her see what only I had seen. 
 I was finally going to do it. 
 I was going to betray him. 
 Even before I'd begun reading this book, I knew it would break my heart. All the signs pointed to it. But what I never expected was how this book would become a memory permanently ingrained in my mind. I did not anticipate this book leaving its mark on me forever. 
 Your Voice Is All I Hear has several crucial messages. It tells of the cruelty of bullying, the ridicule a person faces if he/she is LGBT, the importance of supporting and sticking by your loved ones in times of adversity, the dilemmas people face when their loved ones are no longer familiar to them. But most importantly, it shines a light on schizophrenics, the details of schizophrenia, and the difficulties faced by the people who love them. 
 Schizophrenia is often a life-long struggle and tends to appear in late adolescence or early adulthood. It is a breakdown of the relation between thought, emotion and behaviour, leading to faulty perception, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships, and journeys into fantasy and delusion. It is characterised by hallucinations, delusions and other cognitive difficulties. A schizophrenic will most likely hear voices that no one else can hear, which gradually convince him/her of a different reality than the one he/she is living. This results in the person having so-called "delusions". In the book, Jonah believes the government is trying to break into his mind and control him, for example. 
 "April, this wasn't just a disorganised paper. I'm worried because Jonah stopped making sense." 
 As April mentions in the story, schizophrenia is not like other long-term diseases or chronic illnesses, not even cancer. When someone gets cancer, friends and family band together to raise funds, show support and help the person in any way they can. But with schizophrenia, it's different. Schizophrenics are an embarrassment to their family, who often try to deflect questions about the patient, resorting to making various excuses to explain his/her absence, such as overseas study or visiting faraway relatives. There are many stigmas surrounding schizophrenics, such as the misconception that they are "lunatics" who might go crazy and stab someone any moment, or the one that they are "amnesiacs" who have lost their memory and won't remember their actions. All of these are not true. Schizophrenics, not the people around them, are often the victims of their own mind. 
 "Oh, April, he knew," she murmured. "He knew what was happening to him. And this was how he tried to tell you." 
 [...] I had pictured a clean break. A healthy mind and then confusion. But what if Jonah had seen this coming? Could it have started slowly? Could he have had moments of clarity when he knew that something was very wrong? It would have been like the minutes before a plane crash. You know exactly what's coming and yet you're powerless to stop it. 
 Sadly, this has happened in my very own family as well. My father's cousin has schizophrenia, although I believe his form of the illness has led to him having intense OCD. I only learned about this a few years back when I was more mature. When I was young, however, and too naive to know any of this, I would see their family at Chinese New Year gatherings and the adults, including my parents and my father's siblings, would tell me that my father's cousin had "done something wrong" and he was "sitting in the room alone as punishment", and they would remind me absolutely not to go near him without an adult around. I accepted this explanation without question, but the warning itself didn't quite work on me: I ended up feeling sorry for him instead, sitting all alone with no one to talk to. So of course, I sometimes approached him when no one was looking, and I would catch him staring at a certain point and sometimes smiling or chuckling to himself. 
 Years later, this novel serves both as a rude awakening and the dawn of understanding. I have seen many, many books about mental illness, but most of them touch on the subject of suicide. (All the Bright Places being recently the most famous one, even though I haven't read it.) This is the very first time I've seen a YA book about schizophrenia. Far from inappropriate handling of the subject, Leah Scheier tells the story in a bluntly, heartbreakingly honest way without mincing any words or seeming insensitive. 
 Your Voice Is All I Hear also touches on the subject of bullying with regards to various characters. Having been a victim of bullying before due to my appearance, I cannot understand how someone can take pleasure in tearing somebody else down. I speak personally when I say that the hurt and the blow to victims' self-esteem is more than anyone can comprehend. Especially during the teenage years, when everyone is still discovering their identity and has some measure of insecurity. I am only lucky because I have innate resilience and strength, and though honestly I have contemplated suicide before, ultimately I have grown into someone beautiful, risen above the ashes like a phoenix and never let anyone get to me again. I cannot emphasise this enough: bullying is despicable. It is deplorable. It is intolerable. It can drive people to extremes and wound people beyond words. And I love this book because it brings home that realisation. 
 In this novel, April seemed like an average character at first, but over time, I grew to love her strength, stoicism and determination. She had remarkable strength of character and knew what she wanted, and she would put all her heart and soul into following her dreams and never let anything get in the way. 
 "No matter what?" he echoed. "You've said that to me before, do you remember? That's kind of been your motto, hasn't it, throughout our whole relationship?" 
 April stood by Jonah throughout the tumult of his diagnosis and the subsequent months after, defending him in his absence against hurtful classmates and believing in him even when he didn't seem the same to her anymore. She was wonderful and supportive and it just brought tears to my eyes when I read the ending, because she didn't deserve it. 
 The ending. I think I had the inkling that I wouldn't be getting a HEA, not when it came to this book, with all its darker themes and sombre plotline, but I hoped. I still hoped anyway. And then my hopes were crushed. 
 Fortunately, as I read the last chapter, I found the ending wasn't completely sad after all. It was, in fact, bittersweet. But the final sentence of this book still brought me to tears. It spoke of a future filled with possibilities. It spoke of two star-crossed souls, knit tightly together by destiny, torn apart by illness and cruel fate, but patched together again by hope, the hope that they would someday meet again. 
 But someday, far off in the future, maybe we could put together a different ending. We'd both be a little older; he'd have learned to trust himself again, and I'd have learned to stand on my own without him. Then maybe we would run into each other one last time, somewhere when we least expected it, in a mall or at a park, some simple place like a corner bus stop. And maybe then Jonah and I would finally finish our first kiss. 
 Your Voice Is All I Hear was a wonderful eye-opener, a heartbreakingly real story filled with desperation, hope, disappointment, dreams, love and all the things that make us human. I will never forget the messages embodied in this book, and I am thankful to have read it and gained more understanding as well as shattered my own stereotypes and assumptions of schizophrenics. I had assumed that this would be a sad book, but it is more than just tear-inducing. It is so much more. This novel is inspirational without preaching too much, mournful without being too cloying, sad without being too dark, desperate without being too destructive. It merely describes the reality of schizophrenia as it is and leaves you to form your own conclusions and opinions. I implore everyone to read this book. It will change your life. 
 Before Reading: 
 I have a feeling this book is going to break my heart. 
 Also, the cover is super aesthetic. So even if I didn't like the book it would look great in Instagram photos.