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A World Without You
Cover of A World Without You
A World Without You
What would you do to bring back someone you love? After the unexpected loss of his girlfriend, a boy suffering from delusions believes he can travel through time to save her in this gripping new novel from New York Times bestselling author Beth Revis.
"A story that’s both heartbreaking and hopeful." Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Revis’s account of grief, loss, first love, and anguish, presented through a lens of mental illness, is a must-read.” VOYA, starred review

“A heartrending, beautifully complex look at mental illness, life, and loss. I tore through the pages, and, days later, this story still has a hold on me.”Alexandra Bracken, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Darkest Minds series and Passenger

Seventeen-year-old Bo has always had delusions that he can travel through time. When he was ten, Bo claimed to have witnessed the Titanic hit an iceberg, and at fifteen, he found himself on a Civil War battlefield, horrified by the bodies surrounding him. So when his concerned parents send him to a school for troubled youth, Bo assumes he knows the truth: that he’s actually attending Berkshire Academy, a school for kids who, like Bo, have "superpowers."
At Berkshire, Bo falls in love with Sofia, a quiet girl with a tragic past and the superpower of invisibility. Sofia helps Bo open up in a way he never has before. In turn, Bo provides comfort to Sofia, who lost her mother and two sisters at a very young age. 
But even the strength of their love isn’t enough to help Sofia escape her deep depression. After she commits suicide, Bo is convinced that she's not actually dead. He believes that she's stuck somewhere in time — that he somehow left her in the past, and now it's his job to save her.  
Not since Ned Vizzini’s It’s Kind of a Funny Story has there been such a heartrending depiction of mental illness. In her first contemporary novel, Beth Revis guides readers through the mind of a young man struggling to process his grief as he fights his way through his delusions. As Bo becomes more and more determined to save Sofia, he has to decide whether to face his demons head-on, or succumb to a psychosis that will let him be with the girl he loves.
What would you do to bring back someone you love? After the unexpected loss of his girlfriend, a boy suffering from delusions believes he can travel through time to save her in this gripping new novel from New York Times bestselling author Beth Revis.
"A story that’s both heartbreaking and hopeful." Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Revis’s account of grief, loss, first love, and anguish, presented through a lens of mental illness, is a must-read.” VOYA, starred review

“A heartrending, beautifully complex look at mental illness, life, and loss. I tore through the pages, and, days later, this story still has a hold on me.”Alexandra Bracken, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Darkest Minds series and Passenger

Seventeen-year-old Bo has always had delusions that he can travel through time. When he was ten, Bo claimed to have witnessed the Titanic hit an iceberg, and at fifteen, he found himself on a Civil War battlefield, horrified by the bodies surrounding him. So when his concerned parents send him to a school for troubled youth, Bo assumes he knows the truth: that he’s actually attending Berkshire Academy, a school for kids who, like Bo, have "superpowers."
At Berkshire, Bo falls in love with Sofia, a quiet girl with a tragic past and the superpower of invisibility. Sofia helps Bo open up in a way he never has before. In turn, Bo provides comfort to Sofia, who lost her mother and two sisters at a very young age. 
But even the strength of their love isn’t enough to help Sofia escape her deep depression. After she commits suicide, Bo is convinced that she's not actually dead. He believes that she's stuck somewhere in time — that he somehow left her in the past, and now it's his job to save her.  
Not since Ned Vizzini’s It’s Kind of a Funny Story has there been such a heartrending depiction of mental illness. In her first contemporary novel, Beth Revis guides readers through the mind of a young man struggling to process his grief as he fights his way through his delusions. As Bo becomes more and more determined to save Sofia, he has to decide whether to face his demons head-on, or succumb to a psychosis that will let him be with the girl he loves.
Available formats-
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB eBook
Languages:-
Copies-
  • Available:
    1
  • Library copies:
    1
Levels-
  • ATOS:
    5.1
  • Lexile:
    780
  • Interest Level:
    UG
  • Text Difficulty:
    3 - 4


Excerpts-
  • From the book ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

    Copyright © 2016 Beth Revis

    “It’s time, Bo,” Ryan says, putting his hand on my shoulder.

    I shrug him off.

    “Come on, buddy.” He reaches for me again, but I step further away. Buddy. Ryan’s not my friend, and it’s pointless of him to pretend like he is. Ryan is no one’s friend.

    My feet make hollow sounds on the weathered planks of the old boardwalk, but I have to stop soon enough. The giant metal gate before me is painted green to blend into the environment, which is dumb because the environment’s not really that green around here. But either way, it stops me from going forward. Not that I have anywhere to escape to anyway.

    Berkshire Academy, where I live five days out of every week, is on an island. Not a tropical paradise—nope, nothing like that. It’s in Massachusetts, of all places. Everything good about living on an island is twisted here. Islands have beaches and the ocean, yeah? Well, Pear Island has those, but good luck having fun under the sun around here. I mean, we have the sun, obviously, but it’s behind clouds. And rain. And some- times snow. A lot of times snow. And wind. Wind so strong that it blows the sand in your face like it has a personal vendetta against you. And the short summer we do have, when there is actually sun, is interrupted by, like, a month of flies swarming around. Not buzz-buzz nice flies, but greenhead flies. They sting and bite and are basically the biggest jerks of the fly population, designed specifically to ruin the day of anyone who may dare think that living on an island means you should be able to, I don’t know, lie on the beach or enjoy the sun.

    We don’t even have a decent boardwalk. Our boardwalk was built fifty years ago, so walking on it barefoot sucks. And oh, by the way, the boardwalk goes through a marsh, so the only people who actually want to use it are old farts who look at birds.

    Oh, how I love my island life.

    “Come on, man,” Ryan says again, this time with more impatience in his voice. “It’s time to go.”

    I turn, leaning my back against the green metal gate. “There’s no point.”

    Ryan shrugs.

    I push off from the gate and follow him back toward Berkshire, the bricked mansion just visible beyond the trees in the distance.

    The Doctor said Berkshire was placed here—at the end of a particularly non-paradise tropical island—because of a special grant from the government. Most of the island is a state park. The southern tip, where we are, is just the Berk and some old ruins from seventy years ago, when there was a “camp” for people with polio. The top of the island is full of ice cream shops and tourists, but we hardly ever get to go there.

    Ryan trudges ahead of me, keeping to himself. Good. I don’t want to talk.

    I’m mad.

    This whole thing is meaningless. This whole day. There’s no point to being here. To doing this.

    “You have to understand,” Dr. Franklin told me this morning when I informed him I wouldn’t be going to the assembly. “People need closure.”

    “I don’t,” I growled.

    The Doctor had given me that smarmy sympathetic smile that people do when they think they know more than you. “Come anyway,” he said.

    I’d hoped that if I ventured as far out into the island as I could go, he might forget about me. Or, if not forget, at least...

Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    Starred review from April 25, 2016
    Through two gripping and very different narrative voices, Revis (the Across the Universe trilogy) examines a family struggling with a child’s severe mental illness. Bo, whose omnipresent visual delusions have left him believing that he can manipulate time, attends a boarding school for children with “exceptional needs” while his sister, Phoebe, excels socially and academically back at home. “I don’t have the luxury of allowing myself to break,” she reflects, thinking of her parents. “Because if I break, they’ll break too.” Unable to accept that his girlfriend, Sofía, committed suicide, Bo blames himself for trapping her in 1692 Puritan Massachusetts, and focuses relentlessly on saving her. Though striking imagery, Revis conveys the vitality and terror of Bo’s reality: “I stare down at the chaotic, beautiful timestream spreading out in front of me.... Any chance I had of pulling the end of Sofía’s string from the vortex disappears before my eyes.” The siblings’ perspectives capture the family’s daunting emotional, financial, and clinical challenges, conflicted feelings, and growing mutual compassion, creating a story that’s both heartbreaking and hopeful. Ages 12–up. Agent: Merrilee Heifetz, Writers House.

  • Kirkus

    May 1, 2016
    In a special school on a small Massachusetts island, a boy struggles to find his place in time.Bo attends the Berkshire Academy for Children with Exceptional Needs. Narrating in the present tense, he explains the school's mission: training kids to master their supernatural powers and to hide them from the broader world. But something horrendous has happened: Bo, who time travels, took his girlfriend, Sofia, back to 1692 and accidentally left her there. As a brown-skinned Latina (Bo's white, which goes unspecified) who turns invisible, Sofia could face execution in the Puritan colony, which is enduring the Salem witch trials. Bo works doggedly to travel back in time and save her, but the timestream fights him, and someone may be controlling his mind. A trickle of textual clues and several first-person chapters from Bo's sister, Phoebe, reveal that delusions, dissociation, and psychosis are at work. Bo has severe mental illness, as do his classmates. His palpable torment, confusion, and belief in his powers build to a terrifying crescendo in a vivid conflagration scene. Bo sees a choice: the 21st century, where he's sick, or somewhere outside time with Sofia, where he has powers. At the end, the text steals Bo's voice and centrality by giving the closing narration to Phoebe--flipping Bo's story, suddenly and frustratingly, into a disabled-sibling tale. A page-turning psychological thriller in which mental illness is tragic. (Fiction. 14 & up)

    COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  • School Library Journal

    June 1, 2016

    Gr 8 Up-Bo attends a private boarding school on an island off the Massachusetts coast. It's a prestigious school for students learning how to hone their unique powers. All the students there have special skills-Bo can travel through time; his girlfriend, Sofia, can make herself invisible; Gwen can produce fire from her hands; and Ryan can move things telekinetically. As the story opens, Bo is concerned. He's managed to jump Sofia back to 1692 and can't seem to get her back; he can see the thread that connects her, but can't grab hold. Meanwhile, Bo's supervisor, the Doctor, attempts to convince Bo that Sofia has committed suicide and that Bo needs to come to terms with this. Occasional chapters in his sister's voice help readers sort out the ramblings of a confused narrator and realize that Bo is at an inpatient facility for the mentally ill and is wrestling with fugue states that go on for days at a time. As a side note, the author's reputation for superlative speculative fiction, such as Across the Universe, casts a shadow of lingering doubt that leaves readers willing to suspend disbelief to the very end, yearning for Bo to actually be able to travel through time. VERDICT A compelling peek into the darkest corners of mental illness; hand this to those who enjoyed Nic Sheff's Schizo.-Leah Krippner, Harlem High School, Machesney Park, IL

    Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • Booklist

    May 1, 2016
    Grades 8-11 In her latest, best-selling Revis adds to the growing list of YA contemporary fiction dealing with mental health disorders. Seventeen-year-old Bo attends Berkshire Academy, which he believes is a school for kids with superpowers, and struggles in the aftermath of his girlfriend, Sofia's, suicide. Convinced he can travel through time, Bo refuses to believe Sofia died. Instead, he's certain she's trapped in the year 1692. Intermittent chapters from his sister Phoebe's point of view serve as a counterpoint to his distorted perception of reality and show how his family struggles with Bo's dissociative disorder as he spirals out of control. While Bo's struggle is palpable, the treatment here lacks the depth of feeling and sophistication found in Neal Shusterman's Challenger Deep (2015). Though the twists and turns are driven more by plot necessity than stemming from character growth (unfortunately mostly absent in Phoebe's chapters), the accessible prose and capable storytelling will appeal to reluctant readers and Revis' fan base. Overall, a gripping exploration of a young man's struggle with delusions and grief. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Revis' Across the Universe series was a big hit, and her many fans wouldn't want a world without her latest offering.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

  • The Horn Book

    January 1, 2017
    Two alternating, emotionally entangling first-person narrations present different versions of events: Bo tells readers that he attends an exclusive boarding school for students with supernatural powers; his sister Phoebe reveals that Bo suffered a mental breakdown. In YA's answer to Shutter Island, Bo's delusions ensnare readers, who will then find themselves unable to escape the terrified confusion and distrust as his reality shatters.

    (Copyright 2017 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

  • The Horn Book

    July 1, 2016
    Two alternating and emotionally entangling first-person narrations present different versions of reality and of the novel's events. Bo tells readers that he attends the Berkshire Academy for Children with Exceptional Needs, an exclusive boarding school for students with supernatural powers. Bo and his classmates are all learning to master their abilities, from telepathy to pyrokinesis to Bo's own power of traveling through time. But after a terrible accident that leaves Bo's girlfriend Sofia stranded in the past, government officials infiltrate the school, weakening Bo's powers and sabotaging his efforts as he desperately tries to rescue Sofia. Meanwhile, Phoebe, Bo's younger sister, is a driven, high-achieving high-school junior with limitless possibilities before her and no idea what to do with them. Phoebe's narration reveals that Bo suffered a mental breakdown and was sent to Berkshire to deal with his grandiose delusions of controlling time. Ever since then, Phoebe has dreamed of nothing but the freedom to be imperfect -- a freedom she has always envied Bo. When Bo's girlfriend commits suicide, Phoebe is frightened by her brother's further sinking into delusion and psychosis and by her own thoughts that her world would be more stable without him. In YA's answer to Shutter Island, Bo's belief in his powers ensnares readers, who will then find themselves unable to escape Bo's terrified confusion and distrust as the reality in which he has supernatural powers instead of severe mental illness begins to crack and finally shatters. anastasia m. collins

    (Copyright 2016 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

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