Yo te inventé

**Author:** Francesca Zappia

**Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The fragile boundary between what is real and what the mind creates, the loneliness of carrying a diagnosis that makes others see you as dangerous, and the terrifying act of trusting another person when you cannot always trust your own perceptions.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who want a love story that does not flinch, a portrait of mental illness that refuses easy answers, and a novel about two people who learn to see each other clearly even when the world refuses to see them at all.

Francesca Zappia's "Yo te inventé" begins with a memory that may not be a memory at all. At seven years old, Alex stands before a lobster tank in a Meijer supermarket, her red pigtails pressed against the glass, watching creatures doomed to boil alive. A boy appears beside her with impossible blue eyes and recites the lobster's scientific classification. He lifts her up so she can reach the tank's hatch. She pulls lobsters out one by one, dropping them onto the tile floor, convinced she is freeing them. Then her mother yanks her away, and the boy waves goodbye with her abandoned Yoo-hoo bottle. She never learns his name. Years later, her mother tells her the truth. She never freed the lobsters. The boy was never there. Her first friend was a hallucination, the earliest sign of the paranoid schizophrenia that would be diagnosed when she was thirteen. This is the wound at the center of the novel: the knowledge that your own mind can fabricate people, conversations, entire moments, and make them feel as real as anything you have ever touched. Alex has spent four years building a system to survive this. She photographs everything suspicious, because hallucinations fade from pictures over time. She checks her food for poison. She spins in circles when entering rooms. She has learned to doubt herself constantly, and that doubt is exhausting. Then Miles walks into Finnegan's diner, and his blue eyes detonate something in her memory. He is the boy from the lobster tank. He must be. But she has been wrong before. The novel that unfolds is part mystery, part love story, and part survival narrative. It is about a girl who cannot trust her own mind and a boy who cannot name his own emotions. It is about the ways people become trapped: by illness, by family, by the stories others tell about them. And it is about what happens when two people decide, against every reason to be afraid, to trust each other anyway. Zappia writes with unflinching clarity about schizophrenia, refusing both the romanticized version and the monstrous…