I received an advanced reader copy from the publisher, the ever fabulous Apex Publications.

Stay Crazy follows Em, a mentally unstable young woman who is trying to get her life back after a previous breakdown. When she starts work at the local Savertown USA, she is unnerved when she is contacted by an otherworldly entity asking her to help it save the world from an evil otherworldly entity.

Yes it sounds a bit nutty but Satifka creates an interesting world. Em isn't always a likable character. This made it hard to care for her but the more I got to know her, her attitude felt like a defense mechanism coupled with all she'd been through. The town itself is reminiscent of a lot of small places now and the commercialization of our lives to the point where we are happy with crappy products that don't last. No wonder Em is always so cranky.

Stay Crazy is definitely worth a read. It's not all sunshine and rainbows but what in life really is. ( )

Stay Crazy is a good alien invasion story relying on alternate realities and hierarchical planes of existence for both the threat and the solution to the threat. Em is one of the few that can save the world, and being young and unsure of herself, must grow up fast to fulfill the task given her. That her task is to save the world (and the next) is just another bit of pressure on her life.

Either that, or the fact that she is a schizophrenic depressive suffering from illusions and risks being a danger to society.

It's a fun read. ( )

Em, recently diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, is home from college and working at the local Walmart-analogue when the frozen foods start to talk to her. An entity from another dimension needs her help to save the world. Yes, sounds like a hallucination, but there are all those inexplicable suicides taking place at the store… The descriptions of the florid aspects of Em’s delusions were appropriately unnerving. ( )

What happens when a girl from a small town hears voices that tell her to save the world? Is it sci-fi or delusions? I'll leave that up to you.

This book is an enjoyable read with a believable protagonist (even if I don't always believe what she tells me). I'd say this is definitely worth taking a look at.

"Sometimes knowing isn't enough. Isn't that what I learned about my hallucinations? Just knowing this is a product of the entity doesn't make it any less real when I'm in its grip."

Stay Crazy is told from the perspective of Emmeline, a girl who's struggling with a mental illness that makes her hallucinate and gives her paranoia induced anxiety attacks. In order to get her life on track again her mother pushes her to get a job at a local store. Soon weird things start happening: one after the other the employees start killing themselves even when they have never shown any kind of depressive disorder. At first Em doesn't think much about the matter but when a man from a different plane of existence, Escodex, contacts her through a box of chicken nuggets the paranoia starts again: is she having another hallucination? Is her mental illness worsening? Could Escodex be in fact real? What Escodex tells her is that an evil entity has hopped into Em's dimension through a nexus that is placed in her store and that this entity is slowly draining the employees' energy by feeding on it. Em's job is to help Escodex putting an end to this situation because it could lead to the end of everything. At first Em is of course skeptical, surely she's forgotten to take the right medications, but when this world starts getting realer and realer she decides to give Escodex a chance and accepts to help him. Plus he's promised her he'll help her finding her missing father once everything will be resolved.

"Does this sound a little crazy? Well, brace yourselves boys, this ride's just beginning."

What conviced me to request this title was, and I'm not afraid to admit it, the bit in the synopsis that says "Escodex begins talking to Em from a box of frozen chicken nuggets" because it sounded just like my kind of weird and I actually enjoyed the first half of this book but then not so much. The story didn't seem to go anywhere and every situation seemed disconnected from the other. The characters were kinda one dimensional if we exclude Em (whose internal dialogues were actually snarky and funny) and the overall plot seemed to be all over the place. I wasn't interested into the story's outcome and not once I felt invested by what the characters were going through. I believe that the author could have explored her world better, she focused a lot more on Em's illness and supposed romantic life but not on the development of her story. The original idea was very interesting and I enjoyed how eerie the setting could get. If you pick this book as a light read you might as well enjoy it but since I was expecting an actual sci-fi I was a bit disappointed. ( )