Shooting Up chronicles Tepper’s childhood growing up in Madrid’s San Blas neighborhood, where his missionary parents founded a groundbreaking drug rehabilitation center during the height of Spain’s heroin epidemic. It is a tale of addiction, recovery, and loss seen through the eyes of an American boy navigating between his family’s dedication to helping others and the harsh realities of AIDS during a time of needle sharing. With lyrical prose and sharp-eyed honesty, he delivers an exceptionally powerful story of love and compassion. Shooting Up is a quietly devastating coming-of-age memoir that is as unsettling as it is unforgettable—a haunting exploration of belief, belonging, and the costs of sacrifice.

Before we start this review, I want to take the time and thank Jonathan Tepper for sending me a free copy of this book to read and review. I always try to be neutral about the books I read and review no matter if I am reviewing an author I hate, love or I am brand new to. And this review wont be any different even thou I got a free copy of this book.

The plot in this book is very interesting and engaging for me personally. I personally am not religious, but I found Jonathan Tepper’s life which we get told in this book very interesting. Jonathan Tepper was a kid to missionary parents who moved to Spain and started centers to help drug addicts to get clean through religion, kindness, love and physical work of recovering old furniture people would donate to the centers. 

A returning theme of this book is love, kindness and never losing the aspect of being hopeful. This book is very moving and emotional because Jonathan Tepper had grown up with drug addicts as his brothers and sisters because his parents were missionaries in Spain, and a lot of them had AIDS before medication for it was even created. So Jonathan Tepper describes that a lot of the drug addicts who had AIDS but who he also seen as good friends would die. So growing up he would struggle with the sense of death and how unfair death can be because even his younger brother had died in a fatal car crash.

At the same time the book has motivated me (at the very least) to overcome life’s adversities. Because the best thing we can do when someone close to us die is to keep living our lives and be as happy and hopeful as we can to honor their memories because real friends and family members would want us to be happy and not spend our entire lives in misery. This book also shows us that no matter what happens to us, we still have a chance at a good tomorrow as long as we don’t lose hope for a better future. 

This book also gave me a lot of things to think about which I personally haven’t thought about before reading this book. The big theme of this book is of course helping other people who are struggling, and this book shows that we dont have to have tons of money or have the perfect life ourselves to help others. Sometimes the best help we can give other people who are struggling is to give them love, kindness, compassion and hope that they can get out of the bad places they have gotten into.

This book talks about HIV crisis amongst drug users in Madrid, Spain in the 1980s. All the books I have read about this topic didnt exactly give examples of lives where a person was struggling in real time with being a drug user / ex-drug user who have gotten HIV from being a drug user. And this book gives us exactly that, which made me pretty hard to read at times because of how honest and clear Jonathan Tepper was in this book. And because of it I just couldn’t stop reading this book, because it found to be SO interesting. Because this book shows how challenging it is to live with the illness, but also how challenging it can be to live along side drug addicts who are HIV positive while trying to help them.

Because of the heavy and emotional plot this book has, it has a lot of heartbreaking and depression moments yet Jonathan Tepper is able to also give us joyful and hopeful moments through this book. Which made it a very good read for me personally. 

At the same time this book has a huge underdog vibe to it, because Jonathan Tepper and his real siblings didnt have a lot of money growing up, because they were a missionary family and most of the income their got from church or donations would go to the centers his parents created. Jonathan Tepper shows in this book that there was a period of time where this parents could send all of their kids to school, so they have also sent to school his oldest bother and Jonathan Tepper with his 2 other siblings would be homeschooled for a while. But he was still able to get accepted to a university in USA and eventually start his own company. And even thou his family didnt have a lot of money, they had some books at home which their parents would share with him and his siblings, which has ignited the urge in Jonathan Tepper and his siblings to be curious about learning and teach themselves things they were interested in. 

I personally am not a religious person, but I feel pretty happy that other people who have struggled much more than me personally could find help and guidance from God which helped them to overcome their addictions. This book also talks about religion a fair share, and the topic which have resonated with me personally is that you dont have to agree with everything that the religion say, you can choose to believe in the good parts and still call yourself religious. 

This book also talks about the fact that having missionary parents can be pretty hard at times, because the missionary parents can at times feel like they are spending more time with other people than their kids and that the parents belong more to other people than to their kids. Because of how much the missionary parents want to help other people who are struggling.

The writing style in this book is very good, because this book talks about some very heavy stuff, but the writing style in this book made it easier for me to read about those heavy stuff. Because the writing style in this book has something to it that made me feel that good things were just around the corner and not make me too depressed reading this book. The writing style was very easygoing and good, because it was in Jonathan Tepper’s perspective.

To end this review, I want to thank Jonathan Tepper again for the free copy. And say that this book is easily the best book I have read so far this year.

I Give This Book 5 / 5