Review - Junk by Josephine Myles

Jasper needs help. He’s willing to admit that now. His compulsion to collect books, including ones he never plans to read, has turned his home into an unlivable space, with almost every room filled with stacks of books, some to the point of being inaccessible. Jasper calls in a team to help him figure out how to deal with his problem. Lewis and his sister have their own little business helping hoarders work out their issues and reclaim their living space. Lewis recognizes Jasper as the boy he had a crush on in school. If anything, the man is more attractive, and Jasper clearly feels attracted to Lewis. The problem is that there are some boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed in therapy, and getting involved with a patient is top of the list.

Hoarding may seem like an unlikely background to romance, but a sympathetic portrayal of the psychology of the compulsion makes it work well. The therapeutic treatment for Jasper’s problem seems very believable. It’s good that the author didn’t try to condense the time frame to make the story move faster. While the main plot can be a depressing subject, there are some very laugh out loud moments, many of them provided by Lewis’ very unconventional parents.

Jasper is a tricky character to write. It would be easy to portray him as weak or pitiable. Jasper’s emotional state is the result of a complex combination of grief, guilt, and anger. In short, he’s a real, three-dimensional, human being. Most of the story is about the process of untying the knots that have gone into making Jasper a hoarder, which in turn allows us to know all those secrets he’s been keeping.

Lewis may have extensive training in psychotherapy, but he’s proof that even they are human. He makes mistakes with Jasper. He tries to put things right, tries to do the right thing, but in some ways just makes things worse.

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