Book Review: "The Infinite Noise" by Lauren Shippen

Sixteen-year-old Caleb Michaels is handsome, popular, and athletic, running back on his high school football team. But lately he's been struggling emotionally and he can't figure out why. It's almost as if he is drowning in so many emotions all at once and he doesn't know where they're coming from, but he's finding it harder and harder to take.

When an encounter with a classmate turns violent and he doesn't even remember the situation escalating, Caleb begins counseling. Through therapy he discovers there's a reason for his mood swings—Caleb is an Atypical, a person with enhanced abilities, and his ability is extreme empathy, meaning he feels the emotions of everyone else around him. While that is a difficult enough challenge for anyone, being an empath in high school is harder than anything, because what more is high school than a hotbed of emotions?

As he tries to navigate through the challenges posed by this newly discovered ability, Caleb keeps noticing that he's being consumed more and more by the emotions of one classmate in particular, Adam. Adam is smart, sensitive, a loner, who tries to keep to himself to avoid being bullied, yet he doesn't quite understand that doing so keeps him isolated from those who might be his friend. Even though Adam thinks Caleb would never want to be his friend, he does recognize elements of a kindred spirit that he hopes could someday blossom into something special.

In an effort to understand why Adam's emotions in particular affect him so, Caleb's therapist encourages him to become Adam's friend. This opens up both boys to more vulnerability than they're prepared for, and they realize that they have more in common than they could imagine. But at the same time, it also illustrates to Caleb that there's a danger in feeling too much, especially when you're in high school, where to survive, emotions need to be hidden more than anything else.

Lauren Shippen's debut novel, The Infinite Noise, is based on her popular podcast series, "The Bright Sessions." I'd never heard of that before but apparently Caleb and Adam's characters appear in that, although I didn't feel like I was missing anything when I read this. I loved the concept behind this book very much and found it tremendously creative.

I've said a number of times that I tend to be drawn to books that make me feel, so certainly a book about an empath would fit the bill! There was so much I enjoyed about the book, and I thought Shippen captured the emotional quagmire that is high school so perfectly. Her characters weren't too erudite or witty to be believed and their relationships felt natural.

The one challenge in reading a book in which so much emotion is expressed is that at times the pacing dragged a bit, because you tended to see the same things happen again and again. There were only so many times I wanted to see bullying and the characters being cruel and Caleb struggling with how to react. But other than that, and despite the somewhat-fantastical nature of this book, much of it felt truly genuine, particularly the interactions between Caleb and Adam.

NetGalley and Tor Teen gave me an advance copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making it available!

This book will publish September 24, 2019.