Waiting for Fitz
Shadow Mountain, 2019
Addie loves nothing more than curling up on the couch with her dog, Duck, and watching The Great British Baking Show with her mom. It’s one of the few things that can help her relax when her OCD kicks into overdrive. She counts everything. All the time. She can’t stop. Rituals and rhythms. It’s exhausting. When Fitz was diagnosed with schizophrenia, he named the voices in his head after famous country singers. The adolescent psychiatric ward at Seattle Regional Hospital isn’t exactly the ideal place to meet your soul mate, but when Addie meets Fitz, they immediately connect over their shared love of words, appreciate each other’s quick wit, and wish they could both make more sense of their lives. Fitz is haunted by the voices in his head and often doesn’t know what is real. But he feels if he can convince Addie to help him escape the psych ward and get to San Juan Island, everything will be okay. If not, he risks falling into a downward spiral that may keep him in the hospital indefinitely. Waiting for Fitz is a story about life and love, forgiveness and courage, and learning what is truly worth waiting for
Review by Karen Brown at Faculty Book Lunch:
In Spencer Hyde’s debut YA novel, Waiting for Fitz, we are introduced to a quirky and compelling group of teenagers who reside in the psychiatric ward at Seattle Regional Hospital. Told from the point of view of Addie Foster, whose OCD manifests itself in vigilant hand-washing and counting rituals that involve finger-tapping and counting blinks, Spencer’s story combines the pathos of mental illness with the comic relief of two witty teenagers whose puns, grammar slams, and associations with pop culture and the theater of the absurd leave the reader indulging in the power of words and pondering the meaning of life. The connections between the title, Waiting for Fitz, and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, are played out as Addie and her love interest, Fitz, whose feelings of guilt and shame are exacerbated by the auditory hallucinations in his mind, consider breaking out of the psych ward. And what better place to contemplate the idea of waiting for something or someone that never shows up than in a psych ward?
Hyde interweaves the comedic, the tragic, and the complex and leaves us wondering, along with Addie, about some of life’s biggest questions. “What gives life meaning,” Addie asks. “Is it waiting for that thing, that person, to come along and make life more than just a series of absurd rituals?” Mixed with descriptions of Addie’s exhausting rituals is her snarky, authentic voice sharing gems of wisdom: “I still forget sometimes life can play out just like a drama. Truth is overlooked, ignored, searched for but never found, and only when we think the character can’t possibly make it out of the innermost cave alive, we witness a resurrection.” “We all flicker; it just depends on how willing we are to emerge again, and with how much light.”
Waiting for Fitz is about love and family and the meaning of life. It is about courage and forgiveness and figuring out, in a world that seems absurd, what really is worth waiting for.