by Tanya J. Peterson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2016
Educational and affecting; the importance of the author’s ongoing mission to demystify the world of mental health care...
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An exploration of dissociative identity disorder, this fourth novel by Peterson (My Life in a Nutshell: A Novel, 2014, etc.) valiantly addresses the stigma of mental illness.
In the book’s opening pages, Isaac Bittman appears not unlike any other suburban father. Having returned from playing tennis with his friend Max, he starts organizing a birthday party for his young son Dominic. A sense of unease only begins to creep in when Isaac cannot recall setting up an obstacle course for the party and vehemently denies making it, until Max shows him photographs that prove otherwise. Soon, Isaac’s illness gains an uncontrollable and nauseating momentum. He does not remember his actions, and his life begins to break apart. He becomes uncharacteristically violent, loses his job, and his family life begins to suffer. His devoted wife, Reese, attempts to understand his suffering, but when Isaac disappears and is found half dead in the Idaho backwoods, it becomes desperately clear that he requires a level of care that she alone cannot provide. On being admitted to a specialist mental health facility to undergo a revolutionary form of treatment, Isaac asks the doctor: “But Dr. Charlie, what if they don’t? Get better, I mean. What if things just keep getting worse because I’m here? What if I find out things I really shouldn’t know?...I’ll be lost in a new way, a way that’s way worse than ever before.” Peterson’s language captures perfectly the uncertainty of patients facing a mental illness where all solid ground becomes unstable and threatens to give way beneath their feet. The doctor’s answer reflects the magnificent sense of hope captured in the remainder of the novel: “There are answers. Not always obvious or easy ones, but answers nonetheless.” The book proves to be dazzlingly analytical and delicately sympathetic in equal measure. The strength of Peterson’s My Life in a Nutshell lay in its realism and the author’s ability to deftly construct complex psychological portraits. More of the same is offered here, although it appears that the author is even closer to her subject and is able to say to the reader in earnest: this is mental illness, this is how it feels. Few writers possess the courage or working knowledge to draw back the veil on this still largely taboo subject. Peterson possesses this rare talent.
Educational and affecting; the importance of the author’s ongoing mission to demystify the world of mental health care should not be overlooked.Pub Date: May 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62720-105-6
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Apprentice House
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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