I love the books by this author and how Lisa explains a condition that allows you an insight into what it must be like to experience this. In this book Lisa explores bipolar disorder through Maddy. Maddy is a young woman in her first year at NYU. She has broken up with her high school sweetheart and is struggling with uni life, no friends and motivating herself to meet her deadlines. After opting to go to the uni clinic to get a certificate for an extension, she is placed on antidepressants, which at first give her a buzz then flip her into a full blown mania where she becomes completely deluded and feels immortal.
The story is like a series of train wrecks unfolding, and it puts a spotlight on the mental health system and the medications used to treat bipolar disorder for which the side effects are almost as bad as the condition itself. I found myself getting quite stressed by the storyline, so can only imagine how difficult it must be for people with this condition and those on the sidelines trying to be supportive but unable to help.
A great story that hopefully will go a long way to understanding this condition and making it easier for people with this diagnosis to talk openly about what they are going through.
Thank you Netgalley and Allen & Unwin publishers for the opportunity to read this digital ARC.

EXCERPT: She looks in the mirror. The girl she sees has sunken, drunk eyes, greasy hair plastered to her big head, and a hollow face. The girl is joyless. Lifeless. She thinks back to summer, especially near the end, only a little over a month ago, when she was an energetic girl who rode her bike to and from work every day, so happy to be back together with her boyfriend. End-of-summer Maddy had her shit together. Now look at her. Fall Maddy is a total mess. She's like an over-chewed piece of gum - what was once supple, enjoyable, and minty fresh is now hard and flavorless. She wants to spit herself out.
How could she be both of those people? Which is the real her? She examines the face she sees in the mirror.
Am I real?

ABOUT 'MORE OR LESS MADDY': Maddy Banks is just like any other stressed-out freshman at NYU. Between schoolwork, exams, navigating life in the city, and a recent breakup, it’s normal to be feeling overwhelmed. It doesn’t help that she’s always felt like the odd one out in her picture-perfect Connecticut family. But Maddy’s latest low is devastatingly low, and she goes on an antidepressant. She begins to feel good, dazzling in fact, and she soon spirals high into a wild and terrifying mania that culminates in a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

As she struggles to find her way in this new reality, navigating the complex effects bipolar has on her identity, her relationships, and her life dreams, Maddy will have to figure out how to manage being both too much and not enough.

MY THOUGHTS: More or Less Maddy was an especially poignant read for me having, over the previous year, watched a close friend become totally unstable, just like Maddy, and eventually be diagnosed as having bipolar disorder. Unfortunately for him, help was not as easily come by as it was for Maddy, despite our best efforts.

Reading More or Less Maddy was both a beautiful and a painful experience. I kept thinking, 'Oh, that is SO X!' I cried a lot during this book, and I laughed - especially at the bag of marbles 🤣🤣. It also made me realise that muted symptoms had always been there, but we thought that was 'just X'. It took a personal crisis to destabilise him and unleash the full spectrum of symptoms and behaviors.

The author's medical experience as a neuroscientist combined with her innate empathy and insight combine to make More or Less Maddy an outstanding read. This book will do for bipolar disease what Still Alice did for Dementia.

Lisa Genova explores the effects of this disease on family relationships, friendships, love interests and employment.

A must read for everyone, whether you know someone with bipolar or not - and you probably do, even if you don't yet realise it.

⭐⭐⭐⭐.5

#MoreorLessMaddy #NetGalley

MEET THE AUTHOR: Lisa Genova graduated valedictorian, summa cum laude from Bates College with a degree in Biopsychology and has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Harvard University.

Acclaimed as the Oliver Sacks of fiction and the Michael Crichton of brain science, Lisa has captured a special place in contemporary fiction, writing stories that are equally inspired by neurological conditions and our shared human condition.

DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Allen & Unwin via NetGalley for providing a digital ARC of More or Less Maddy by Lisa Genova for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

More or Less Maddy grabbed me from the first page and I didn't want to put it down. It tackled the complex topic of bipolar disorder with both respect and dignity. I liked the fact it focussed on a young adult in her first year of college, a year that can already be challenging enough.

The book gave me a sense of feeling what the highs and lows of life really felt like for Maddy. It not only provided an insightful glimpse into her emotional journey but also gave me valuable information about the condition itself. We also got to see how the condition impacted on Maddy's family and freinds.
Highly recommended.

Thank you to Netgalley and Allen & Unwin for the copy to review.

I’ve read a lot of Lisa Genova’s books, and her first, Still Alice, is in my top 10 fave books ever. I was very hopeful that her latest, More or Less Maddy (due out 14 January), would leave me feeling equally enamoured, but unfortunately, it did not.

Maddy is a 19-year-old college student diagnosed with depression and then, following a manic episode triggered by her medication, bipolar disorder.

While Maddy’s story gave me a greater understanding of the challenges faced when diagnosed with bipolar, I found her character hard to warm to, and hard to relate to.

Possibly because my days as a 19-year-old uni student are waaaay in the past!

If you’re looking to learn more about bipolar, then it’s worth a read, as it definitely gave me insights I was previously unaware of.

3.5 stars

⭐️⭐️⭐️ ½

More or Less Maddy is published by Allen & Unwin on 14 January 2025. My thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for an early review copy.

#MoreorLessMaddy #NetGalley #bookreview #fiction #bipolar
@netgalley @allenandunwin

Brilliant insight: ‘More or Less Maddy’ by Lisa Genova

I’ve read two previous novels by American nueroscientist and author Lisa Genova, and loved them both. Still Alice (made into a feature film) and Left Neglected offered fascinating insights into early onset dementia and a brain injury known as Left Neglect, respectively. More or Less Maddy likewise tells a very human story behind a medical diagnosis that devastates individuals and their families.

When bipolar disorder strikes Maddy, a young college student from a comfortable middle class family in Connecticut, she is already struggling with a sense of not fitting in. While her sister and brother seem to belong to the picture perfect world of their parents, happy with the already mapped-out life trajectories of education and career pathways, marriage, family and lovely home, Maddy dreams of a career as a stand-up comedian in New York.

Her first episode of mania at first feels wonderful. It rockets her out of the depression she has suffered for months, seemingly overnight. Suddenly she feels she can do anything, achieve anything. She doesn’t need to sleep, she writes brilliant comedy, and is sure she will soon be writing an authorised biography of Taylor Swift, her artistic heroine.

It all comes to a sticky end and that is when her distraught and frightened family step in and she is confronted with hospital, therapy, doctors and medication. She is fortunate to be connected with a knowledgable and empathic doctor who skillfully guides both Maddy and her troubled family on this new and frightening journey.

But there are plenty of pitfalls, not least of which is the diagnosis itself. Maddy’s struggles with the lifelong nature of her condition, and the burden of the stigma it carries, are brilliantly and sensitively portrayed in the novel; as are those of her family, who only want to keep her safe.

How to, or indeed whether to tell friends, old and new, of her condition, is a preoccupation. As is coping with the side effects of the various new drugs she must take. Keeping to a pretty strict lifestyle regimen: no late nights, no illicit drugs or alcohol, eating a healthy diet, watching her mood like a hawk, keeping a mood journal…all rather tiresome for a ‘normal’ twenty year-old.

But of course that’s just it. Once she has heard that word – bipolar – Maddy can never feel normal again.

I cared for Maddy a great deal, and could not wait to return to her story each time I had a chance to pick up the book.

The author does not pull punches. Maddy’s situation is not prettied up: there are relapses and mistakes, some that made me want to skip pages. But I read on because I knew this was all a necessary part of Maddy’s story. The ending is not tied up in a neat bow but there is hope for a better future for Maddy and those who love her.

If you see this book in your local bookstore or library, please do read it. It goes a long way to humanise this mental disorder that a suprising number of people live with. Lisa Genova has such a gift and I can’t wait to see what topic she might tackle next.


More or Less Maddy is published by Allen & Unwin in January 2025.
My thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for an early review copy.

I couldn’t connect with this story which offered so much promise from the synopsis, I had to dnf this book unfortunately

I did not finish this book as it lacked the emotional tones that were present in other books written by this author. The writing style was 'telling' rather than 'showing', which made it hard for me to get attached to the plot.

I have read many, if not all, of Lisa Genova’s books. She has a real way of combining her knowledge from being a neuroscientist with her ability to tell a good story. She is an auto-read author for me; whatever book she releases, I’ll more than likely read.
More or Less Maddy is about a 19 year old young woman named Maddy who is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. As the story unfolds, the struggles that Maddy faces become evident, and you can’t help but feel for her.
Without giving too much away, the story takes the reader on a journey through a period of Maddy’s life from when she is first being diagnosed to Maddy acknowledging her condition and getting treatment for it.
Lisa does a great job of bringing conditions such as bipolar to light, and helps readers to understand the issues that someone with bipolar may experience. She also helps to normalize these conditions too. I thought this was a really good read, and I finished it in a couple of days. Thank you to the publishers for allowing me to read and review.

"She's agreed to the part about getting out of bed, but the word quickly has her hung up, defeated at the starting line." Author Lisa Genova doesn't have bipolar disorder, so this book isn't written from a perspective of lived expertise. As such it feels like it's written at arm's length from what it's like to live with bipolar disorder. I do think it might be liked by family members and colleagues of people diagosed with bipolar disorder, because it does set out to explain some of the ways the chronic disease might have the person thinking and acting, and the impacts treatment are likely to have: "It seems she can aspired to be in control of either her moods or her hands but not both." However whether More or Less Maddy will resonate with people who actually have this mental illness remains to be seen.

In terms of the writing, there's often a passive voice and a lot of telling rather than showing: "everything in her feels slowed down, as if someone has reached into her brain and turned the master dial three clicks to the left." Probably the best bit of the book for realism is Maddy's first hospitalisation for bipolar, where she struggles in the grips of mania to understand what is happening: "since when does an exorbitant shopping spree land a person in a mental hospital?" You get a little bit of why people with the disorder break off contact, as they come back to a more even keel and feel shame and embarrassment about "that insane middle-of-the-night-scorched-earth rambling text tirade" they sent you. I guess if it helps people not look at their loved one with so much "wary watchfulness" the book is a good thing. I personally preferred, and found the Anne Buist series about Natalie Walker much more realistic and 'humanising': these books show people with bipolar can be bada*s and sexy and fun too.

I discovered Lisa’s books with Still Alice and enjoyed the way she educates about complex neurological conditions in a thought provoking and engaging way. She really has a way of humanizing these conditions. When I saw that her lastest offering was covering bipolar disease I was keen to see how she tackled loving with mental illness. I also had a personal connection as around 5 years ago, a colleague who had never disclosed her bipolar diagnosis died by suicide. As an attempt to both process my grief and gain understanding I ended up reading a lot of non-fiction and fiction books on bipolar disease.

More or Less Maddy is the journey of Maddy as she learns of her diagnosis and then adjusts to life after it. We meet her as she’s preparing to start college, she’s a typical teenager- working at Starbucks, a Taylor Swift fan and with her on again off again boyfriend. She’s struggling with her classes, the freshman fifteen and ‘PMS’. We then see her experience her first experience of feeling depressed which she bravely goes to treat. The medication she takes for that then triggers her first manic episode. Lisa really gives you a great insight into the highs and lows Maddy felt. You could feel the lack of motivation and struggle to get through the day and her mania was exhausting to read. We then see her learn of her diagnosis, see herstart medication, deal with the side effects before feeling good again and stopping them before coming to understand she has a new normal to live with. I enjoyed seeing how different family members dealt with the diagnoses, particularly her sister’s support. Her mother’s response by trying to hide it from people and being overbearing was frustrating at times but I could understand where she was coming from. I liked that her psychiatrist advocated for her to be independent and addressed the stigma but comparing it other chronic conditions.

Intertwined with this was Maddie navigating the world of stand up comedy. This first manifested as part of her manic episode but soon became a genuine interest. I enjoyed seeing the behind the scenes of this industry and how Maddy had to work hard at it and convince her family it was something she wanted to pursue and not part of her mania. Lisa’s author notes indicated her desire to provide an understanding of what it’s like to live with bipolar to help open conversation, understanding and social change. She’s definitely nailed it and I highly recommend it.