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Loading... I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (Signet)by Joanne Greenberg (otherwise under Hannah Green)
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I read this book because as a prior Psychology Student, I thought I would enjoy this book. However after reading it, I felt it was rather odd, and I could not really get into it. It actually made me feel like I didn't understand the character at all, and that maybe I had even chosen the wrong major if I could not get into this book? The different world and language was confusing. I read before I go to bed, so maybe I wasn't in my best mind when reading. But I don't know, I just didn't like it at all. ( )Teenager Deborah Blau lives both in the real world and the kingdom of Yr, a strange and threatening place that exists only in her mind. Once she is hospitalised, she and Dr. Fried begin to work together to loosen the grip of Yr and bring Debbie back to mental health. Exceptional. Title: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden Author: Joanne Greenberg Genre: Fiction/Autobiographical novel # of pages: 279 Start date: 7/11 End date: 7/15 Borrowed/bought: bought from Hastings My rating of the book, F- [worst] to A [best]: B Description of the book: taken from wikipedia: Rejected by peers and to a certain extent by her family, victimised by anti-Semitism, and traumatized by painful surgery for a tumor of the urethra in early childhood, Deborah Blau is a highly intelligent and sensitive girl who perceives reality as innately cruel. At approximately age nine, during her third summercamp, she creates the Kingdom of Yr, an alternative dimensional world where she is respected as a queen. It has a language of its own called Yri, which may or may not be based on scraps of other languages Deborah heard from her multilingual family. It is rich in metaphor and poetic imagery, with place names like "the Plains of Tai'a" and "the Canyons of the Sorrow". Review: I have an a personal appreciation for what this character/person went through. At times, the descriptions in the book were hard to follow but I enjoyed the symbolism. This book is rather horribly dated. Mental hospitals and the treatment of schizophrenia in the 1960s have very little in common with those things today. Deborah spent years in the hospital, treated with such things as cold packs (wrapping her mummy-like in cold wet sheets) and psychotherapy, rather than the anti-psychotic drugs they used today. The author based the book on her own experiences, but I have read that her schizophrenia diagnosis was probably inaccurate and she most likely suffered from depression with psychotic features. This book might be good for people who want to know what the mental health system was like in the sixties, but I don't think it would do a schizophrenic person any good as far as getting insight into their illness and treatment. While I was buying this book my son's ex-girlfriend was committing suicide. I started reading it 5 hours later, as soon as I found out about Morgan’s death, and finished it the day of her funeral. The "happy" ending of the book gave me no cheer because I know that for people suffering from mental illness, as with Morgan, and to some extent with me, "happy" isn't always the outcome. I think I bought this book in part because I was hoping to see some inkling of what I go through printed on the page, evidence in practiced prose. Like the Oprah show about menopause, a book to show me I’m not alone, or even that I’m not “that” crazy. These are the words that spoke to me: …It was if she had her head down from then on waiting for the blows… Deborah's mind, already exhausted and dulled by another day in the world, grappled for Suzy's feeling. … "She really loves you very much," Esther said. "The whole family is doing everything it can-all the roads have been smoothed over." All Deborah heard were the sounds of her own gasps of exhaustion as she climbed an Everest that was to everyone else an easy and level plain. As she reeled and pulled on the endless, vertical cliff, she felt that every favor, every easing, was an unpaid debt heaped upon her by loving tormenters and weighing like lumps of lead. Among equals gratitude is reciprocal; her gratitude to these Titans, who called themselves average and were unaware of their own tremendous strength in “being able to live”, only made her feel more lost, inept, and lonely than ever. no reviews | add a review
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:56 -0400)
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