Is This a Cry for Help?

Thanks Atria/NetGalley for the gifted DRC book.

The death of her ex sends Darcy into a mental breakdown, spiraling in regret and guilt. After taking a medical leave, she returns to her librarian job to find protests, unrest, calls for book bans, and questioning of DEI programs.

Is This a Cry for Help? explored mental health, grief, queer life, love, challenges of providing communities with library services, bigotry, censorship, and the power of libraries.

Austin’s compelling characters written within realistic situations had me hooked from the beginning. The way she presented the internal monologue of Darcy was so perfect in conveying her anxieties and emotions. The repetition and obsession really put me in her head, giving an unsettled show more feeling throughout.

I loved seeing Darcy explore her identity, what sexuality means to her, how societal expectations shaped her life. There’s a lot of social commentary, some of which felt awkward as it came off a bit heavy handed. Nonetheless, this book tackled so many important topics in a caring way.

Libraries are integral parts of communities. Censorship and anti-DEI are so harmful. This book is a heartwarming queer love letter to libraries. Another read by Austin that I loved! show less

I'm becoming a big Emily Austin fan! This book was a really intimate, very funny, and emotionally affecting portrait of one woman and her very complicated grief for someone with whom she had a very complex, foundational relationship. Mourning the person—a significantly older, singularly male ex—cannot really be extricated from mourning the relationship, and, as a lesbian, also falling somewhere between mourning the fact that the relationship ever happened and mourning the entire life and future that that relationship implied. Add in some general neurodivergence, and a mental breakdown is not surprising. What was surprising was how deftly Emily Austin weaves the heartbreak and the humor of this story.

All of this has as its backdrop a show more library and its patrons and employees, and a maybe too-timely story about right wing attacks on libraries and inclusion. It's depressing, but it seems to me like this part of the story ends much more happily than these things have been ending in libraries in real life, lately. It's grim out there for librarians, everybody. Get involved and support your local library! show less

Rating: 4* of five by the skin of its teeth

The Publisher Says: Emily Austin, the bestselling “queen of darkly quirky, endearingly flawed heroines” (Sarah Haywood, author of The Cactus), returns with a luminous new novel following a librarian who comes back to work after a mental breakdown only to confront book-banning crusaders in an empowering story of grief, love, and the power of libraries.

Darcy’s life turned out better than she could have ever imagined. She is a librarian at the local branch, while her wife Joy runs a book binding service. Between the two of them, there is no more room on their shelves with their ample book collections, various knickknacks and bobbles, and dried bouquets. Rounding out their ideal life is two show more cats and a sun-soaked house by the lake.

But when Darcy receives the news that her ex-boyfriend, Ben, has passed away, she spirals into a pit of guilt and regret, resulting in a mental breakdown and medical leave from the library. When she returns to work, she is met by unrest in her community, and protests surrounding intellectual freedom, resulting in a call for book bans and a second look at the branch’s upcoming DEI programs.

Through the support of her community, colleagues, and the personal growth that results from examining her previous relationships, Darcy comes into her own agency and the truest version of herself. Is This a Cry for Help? not only offers a moving portrait of queer life after coming of age but also powerfully explores questions about sexuality, community, and the importance of libraries.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Grief is a hugely powerful, astoundingly complex, and very misunderstood emotional state. It is often portrayed as something one "gets over" it "moves on" from, but it isn't. It's your bass thrum throughout life when the loss you're grieving is deep enough; otherwise mourning, the act of displaying grief, will poultice the poison out effectively.

Darcy is living in a new world defined by grief. It blindsides her, happily married as she is to the Dickensianly yclept Joy. The grief that blindsided her is for Ben, the last man in her romantic life, at his early and unexpected death. It's the end of some part of her that never developed, that she wasn't pining after; as I've got cause to know from my own life that does not matter a bit to the emotional core. When you've once been in love you are always somewhere in your being connected. Plus she really hurt Ben as she was leaving him. Add to this Darcy's many pulls and demands as an involved, community-building librarian involved in a PR debacle. She had an emotional collapse—been there, Darcy—as a straw too many got loaded on her people-pleasing back.

As soon as she returns to work, Author Austin piles on some very relatable First-Amendment challenges for Darcy to manage: a library patron accesses porn on the library's computers. This is part of the protected access all citizens share, it was done within an appropriately restricted area, and yet other patrons complaining leads to lunatic, high-control (ie fascist) nutjobs mounting a campaign to shut down, censor, restrict lots more than just online porn viewing.

Here's where I got a bit...done...with the story. I'm down with the community-building librarian facing off against those in the community who want to control others' behavior. I'm delighted by a lesbian coping with her unhappy sense of having unnecessarily hurt a man in the process of self-discovery. I'm thrilled by Darcy being in a loving, supportive partnership that enables her to interrogate her compulsion to please everyone to her own detriment (as women are trained to do. But all at the same time? Yes, I'm aware that Life does not have handy-dandy pause buttons on the events that one's required to deal with. Fiction does have that function. It's detrimental to a story's legibility as an emotional journey to lard in more and more and more in only three-hundred-ish pages. There a reason Jean-Cristophe and Middlemarch and War and Peace took skatey-eight skabillion pages to tell their stories. Readers need time to consolidate their emotional responses into their factual learning of plot events.

More breathing room, please. And get rid of Kyle the c-a-t.

I'm not sorry I read the story, but I wouldn't read it again despite my warm, approving glow at the ending. show less

I loved this book! It’s part access-to-information propaganda, part love letter to libraries, while deeply moving and hilarious. Despite some differences, it felt weirdly specific and familiar. Reading the acknowledgements, I understand why: like the author, I went to Western University and lived in Ottawa. I was just talking to my partner about the “Don’t Smoke Pot” infomercial this week. I’m currently sick and absolutely feel like the deflated balloon woman. The cats. The books. The spiraling insecurities. It all hits. Darcy and Joy both felt inspiring in a very grounded way. There were so many lines I highlighted and reread. Reading this felt like being kind to myself, hanging out with friends, and going to therapy. Darcy show more has more guts than I think I ever would. I’m so impressed by Emily Austin writing a book like this, putting it out into the world, it takes real nerve. I will absolutely be buying and reading whatever she writes next.

Thanks to NetGalley, Atria Books and Scribner Canada for access to this book. show less

I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

This book is such a deep psychological dive into the psyche of someone who is a neurotic people-pleaser that it can be a difficult book at times if you are a similarly neurotic person. That said, I'm glad I pushed onward, as I found it to be a very hopeful, affirming book about self-realization and the importance of libraries.

Darcy is a librarian, on her first day back at work after a nervous breakdown. A guy is watching porn in the library. Other people are complaining about it. She is trying to mentally keep it together as she continues to be haunted by the cause of her breakdown: the discovery that her long-time boyfriend died. Darcy is a happily married show more lesbian, but she has long regretted how she hurt him when they broke up. As a person who tries to please her therapist by being a good patient, though, her approach to life and to her own memories is complicated.

As she works through her trauma, she's also having to contend with book banners targeting the library and who are harassing her and her co-workers.

This is a very intimate-feeling book. It touches on dark subjects, but there is also a lot of love and support. show less

A reference librarian at a public library comes back from leave after an inpatient stay in a psychiatric facility. Her first few weeks back are made more difficult by her wife needing to leave town to support a family member's birth and escalating protests about the content and policies of the library.

Emily Austin's new novel is an adept instantiation of the modern novel's use of dramatic tension, as opposed to the piles of books that are hoping to be movies, saturated in trauma because the author can't figure out how to get you to keep reading. Is This a Cry for Help foreshadows some awful stuff including emotional manipulation and political violence, and then disperses the tension expertly as the protagonist learns to better navigate show more her relationships and her community.

The scenes with the therapist are honest and realistic, as are the relationships. The awkward and annoying people (Mordecai) don't get less awkward and annoying, but the way that the protagonist relates to them softens as she heals. The cats never get along, the book banners continue to be creepy, spouses are hacked off at stuff they should be hacked off about, but people act with integrity to their own world view. And the library boss is probably the best manager in the history of managers. In short, this is a very Canadian novel about mostly nice people which was a pleasure to read. show less

Darcy is a librarian. A gay, married, blue-haired librarian. She recently went through a mental crisis brought on by her ex-boyfriend’s sudden death. Darcy has just returned to work at the library when a man watching porn on a library computer sparks a heated battle for the rights of library patrons. This combination of situations going on in Darcy’s life makes her therapy sessions rather productive.

Joy, Darcy’s wife, is very supportive. But Joy’s sister has just given birth and needs Joy with her during these early days. Darcy is going to have to navigate the current challenges in both hers and Joy’s lives long distance.

A really lovely book about mental health and love. Darcy is truly trying to find who she is and how to show more process the feelings she had for her ex Ben. The background fodder of a conservative writer and protestor versus the more liberal and progressive public library brings to light a lot of issues going on in the world today. The novel brings together opposing viewpoints to perhaps teach us a bit about tolerance.

I enjoyed this book immensely. show less