taken from Goodreads:
"Like many ambitious New York City teenagers, Craig Gilner sees entry
into Manhattan's Executive Pre-Professional High School as the ticket
to his future. Determined to succeed at life -- getting into the right
high school to get into the right college to get the right job -- Craig
studies night and day to ace the entrance exam, and does. That's when
things start to get crazy.
At his new school, Craig realizes that
he's just average, and maybe not even that. He soon sees his
once-perfect future crumbling away. The stress becomes unbearable and
Craig stops eating and sleeping -- until, one night, he nearly kills
himself.
Craig's suicidal episode gets him checked into a
mental hospital, where his new neighbors include a transsexual sex
addict, a girl who has scarred her own face with scissors, and the
self-elected President Armelio. There, isolated from the crushing
pressures of school and friends, Craig is finally able to confront the
sources of his anxiety.
Ned Vizzini, who himself spent time in
a psychiatric hospital, has created a moving tale about depression,
that's definitely a funny story."
Vizzini's novel, based on his own 5-day stay in a psychiatric hospital after a breakdown in his twenties (not during his teens, as is often reported in several Goodreads reviews), gets off to a slow start but ultimately leaves you rooting for Craig and the other people he encounters during his battle with clinical depression. I thought Craig's voice was accurate and distinctive, although sometimes his verbal tics get a little annoying (but then again, who doesn't sometimes get annoyed at the way teenagers talk?) There were times when I felt a little confused as to Craig's age -- he seems a little wordly for 15, but then, he's also a teenager growing up in New York City, which is about as far from my own teenage environment as you can get. On the other hand, though, he seems extremely naive, perhaps too naive for a 15-year old. In the long run, what you have is a really intelligent kid who lacks true knowledge of the world around him, which is a common combination in kids like Craig (as my dad used to say, "You've got a lot of book sense but very little common sense!")
The story really didn't pick up for me until Craig actually gets admitted to 6 North; prior to that, we're stuck in his head most of time, with the exception of a few interactions with his parents and sister, his shrinks, or his friends. But those interactions are distant and somewhat over-analyzed, and they all seem to come back to the same thing: Craig and his cyclical battle with depression and anxiety.
It's when Craig has to learn to interact with the other patients in 6 North, plus come to terms with the pressures of the outside world, that I felt he really came to life as a character. Through these developing relationships, Craig grows up quite a bit -- truth be told, his recovery seems a bit sudden, but I can't really fault Vizzini for ending the novel on such a positive note. Craig has learned a lot. In the end, this is a great coming-of-age story for our overmedicated age of anxiety, and Vizzini has done a great job creating a novel that I'm sure will have many kids opening up about their own sources of depression, anxiety, and more.
One thing that really bothered me through the novel was the lack of caring, supportive adult figures in Craig's life. His parents play a role throughout the entire book, and it's obvious that they love Craig and want the best for him, but they come across as pretty clueless. There are a couple of conversations with his doctors, but even those are pretty formal and distant. I know that we're seeing things from Craig's point of view, but I had to wonder: where are the counselors, the teachers? Where are the people who should've guided Craig through the process of applying to such a rigorous school and prepared him for what to expect when he got there? He had no clue as to the type of work that he would be doing on a daily basis at the school, but that kind of information is available. As someone who works with middle school, high school, and college students on a daily basis, I found myself wondering: are we letting our kids down this badly? It also saddens me that Craig's obsession with getting the right job and making money and having things as a path to happiness seems to be the most frequent message that we're sending to our youth.
If you'd like to win an autographed copy of this novel, just leave a comment here by midnight on Wednesday, September 2, 2009. I'll announce the random winner on Thursday.
What a fantastic way to create some kind of oneness with students. As and educator this seems like a fabulous idea. I will think how to adapt it to younger students I think.