Somebody Up There Hates You By: Hollis Seamon

Somebody Up There Hates You

By: Hollis Seamon

    This book is about a 17 year old boy, Richard Casey and is a story filled with sadness, and love. Richard has many experiences from all of the hospice he has been. He shares about the girl he is in love with Sylvie who is also a 17 year old girl. Richard is a smart mouth which get him in trouble most of the time.

  “I Richard Casey- aka the incredible dying boy-actually do live, temporarily, in the very hospice I am going to tell you about.”  “It’s a good diagnosis, don’t you think? For me, for Sylvie, for anybody our age that ends up here and places like it usually after what obits will soon call a ‘courageous battle fill-in-the-blank.’ How else are you going to account for us? SUTHY is the only answer that makes any damn sense.” Richard doesn’t know why everybody is so worried that the nurses of visitors might get him sick, they are dying anyway. Richard has had six years of chemo, radiation, a zillion surgeries, loss of a couple major organs, and watching his mother age twenty years in twenty months.

    Cabbage night is here!  In the areas around New Jersey they celebrate the night before Halloween, October, 30 is Cabbage Night. Cabbage Night is where you go out and do bad things and won’t get in trouble for it. But there is only one rule: be home by midnight. Some of the stuff the do is they take dog poop and put it a brown paper bag, light it on fire, when there person goes to stomp it out, the poop goes everywhere. You can run through peoples yards, leap over fences, scream like a banshee, throw eggs at anything or anyone in sight, hit kids with sacks of flour until they look like ghosts, steal anything that strikes your fancy and isn’t nailed down, tip over gravestones, tie nerdy kids to gravestones until 11:58, break empty beer bottles- after you drink the beer somebody’s cool uncle bought you, threaten to cut other kids throats, set nails point-up  on the streets ,hoping to pierce a car tires; and well anything a person could think of.

   Richards’s mother gets sick and is unable to spend the weekend with him. So he thinks he will be able to get away with anything. His mom calls and says she is going to call every hour. He says that calling is a tiny Band-Aid on teenage wreckage. They are not actually there, so he will still be able to do whatever.

    Right when Richard thinks he is finally alone his Uncle Phil shows up. Richard is not very happy about this! Phil smells like bacon and marijuana smoke and outdoor air. Phil is perfectly bald. And always has a game going on in his head. Richards’s mother does not like her brother because of all the bad things he has done. So without Richard’s mother there he is about to get to know his uncle.

   This book kept me on the edge of my chair throughout the whole book. There is many places that you don’t expect things