The Quest for Juice

Title: The Quest for Juice
Author: Jonathan-David Jackson
Publisher: Kipling Books
Release Date: June 2013
Length: 290 pages (paperback)
Series?: Paranoia #1
Genre: humor
Format: e-book
Source: author

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Synopsis

Oscar has always lived a life of quiet paranoia, but now everything is changing. Suddenly, the bus is frequently late, his house key won’t fit in the lock, and someone has taken his juice, which was the one thing holding his life together. He strikes back against the people behind it all, but when he strikes too hard an innocent man ends up dead, and Oscar ends up in jail, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and facing life in a mental institution. On his journey to mental health and the truth, he has to make hard decisions about medication, trusting his own mind, dating a nurse, and whether that hedgehog can actually talk.

Review

Oscar Well is something else. He is absolutely certain that someone is following him, that “they” are plotting against him. They have stolen his juice, they have tampered with his house key. He is so fearful that he even suspects his very own mother of being in on this plot of deceit against him. He hides in the clothes dryer to avoid her.

Oscar is certifiably insane, no joke about it. Indeed, he is committed to an institution after following a man who he believes is in on this ring…and something terrible happens, something that Oscar refuses to admit.

Oscar is taken to Maple Ridge, where he is put in a bolted room. He is there for an indeterminate amount of time, several weeks at least, and encounters a sweet nurse who suffers from his same mental disorder: schizophrenia. Instead of taking his prescription medicine, Oscar obstinately ignores it, believing it too is somehow being used against him to confuse him and dampen his worries and fears. Nurse Penelope is a gentle woman, and shares her own stories and experiences with Oscar, ultimately convincing him to take his medication as prescribed. He is almost infinitely on the right track, no longer in a constant state of fear, paranoia, worry and skepticism about people.

Eventually, Oscar is free to live his normal life, but things are strange. Even those who are sane around him notice these very odd and bizarre things. Oscar pays them no mind and their paranoid ideas no mind. He begins a sweet courtship with Nurse Penelope, until he tells her about the cameras his new job has installed in his house.

This leads Oscar on a wild goose chase, and the novel picks up momentum at this point. Things are not as they seem…

This book touches on a very serious matter – and includes some very serious content – yet it is written in an extremely humorous light, almost to the point of being characterized too much and over the top. I’m not schizophrenic, nor do I know anyone who is, so I have no idea if the stream of consciousness  that Jackson has used in this book is accurate of schizophrenia, but it is so insane that you can’t help but laugh…continuously.

Although Oscar suffers from schizophrenia, he has a very sharp mind. Too sharp for his own good. The misconception of his reality is as accurate as can be…

About the Author

Jonathan-David Jackson was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, at 3 in the morning on May 14, 1987. At first, he could not walk, talk, or indeed use the toilet. After a year of intensive training in NC, he moved his family to Kingsport, Tennessee, where he finally overcame those early disabilities. Soon, he was walking and talking as good as anyone, and perhaps better. Walking and talking wasn’t good enough, though, so he also learned to write.

He wrote and wrote, and with gentle encouragement from his wife, he finally wrote a book – The Quest for Juice. Then he wrote this biography. Perhaps he’ll do more things; that would certainly be exciting.

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