Mental Health, Indian-Inspired Fantasy, and More YA Book Talk: May 22, 2023

Carpenter and Callen have pulled together a wide array of YA writers, all of whom are sharing fictional stories of people living with mental health challenges. The stories cross genres and experiences, offering everything from a vampire with social anxiety to a teen girl coming to understand her challenges with PMDD. There’s hard stuff here, but there’s also plenty of hope for those who will relate to these experiences.

Shelbi is starting her senior year of high school at a new place in Georgia, Windward Academy. She isn’t really interested in making a lot of friends since she doesn’t plan to be there long and because of her history. She’d rather just…forget about what brought her to this place. But the night the story begins, she gets a text from a wrong number, and while she engages with the texter and learns they’ve been drinking at a party, Shelbi warns them not to drive home.

So when Shelbi is being driven home and goes past a car which has crashed, she begins to think about the texter. And, as we’ll learn, she goes back to the scene of the accident, tying her to the person who was involved in a life-changing way.

Andy Criddle, who is dealing with a host of changes in his family, is drinking again. After his little sister’s death — one he blames himself for — and the loss of his grandfather shortly before, he’s dealing with tremendous grief. Oh, and his mom is running for a political role, wherein she’s pretending to be the biggest right-wing politician out there, on a pro-family, anti-abortion platform. One which she is a hypocrite for advocating, for reasons that will become clear as the story unfolds. 

Soon Shelbi and Andy are connected…and connecting. They’ve been texting each other, mysterious to one another no more. But Shelbi, who has become privy to Andy’s struggle with alcohol, thanks to her learning he was the person behind the accident she saw, is scared to open up to him. To tell him that she, too, struggles with her mental health. That it was her mental health that led her to leaving her life in California for one here in Georgia. When she finally feels ready to tell him, she does so with a list of rules that outline what he can — and cannot — expect from a friendship with her. One of those rules? They cannot fall in love. At all.

This is a story of two very challenged teens who are doing their best to move through their respective days. Both Shelbi and Andy are teens of color, and both struggle with mental illnesses too often underrepresented by people like them in pop culture. Shelbi has bipolar disorder and Andy struggles with substance use. Though both know they could make one another’s issues worse, they also know that when they’re together, they click in untold ways. It is, as Shelbi would describe, something as magical and mysterious as the cosmos. So, too, is their inevitable falling for one another romantically. 

Valerie Chu is a quiet, studious girl, who is obedient to her mother and her father, as well as a dedicated and loyal friend to Jordan, her bestie. The other thing Valerie is — and the thing she is extremely proud of — is thin. Since her earliest recollections, being thin has been prized by her mother, and her mother has monitored her food intake. The book begins with a scene from a birthday party in her youth where Valerie was allowed to blow out the candles on her cake, but she was not allowed to eat a piece herself. The story flashes forward to high school, and while Valerie does eat socially, she follows that up by purging in the bathroom immediately after. Her head is a running calculator on calories. While it’s clear she has a problem, it’s even clearer that her struggles emerged thanks to the toxic culture her mother developed at home.

Now, Valerie is going on a class trip to Paris. She’s thrilled to be there with her best friend Jordan and her crush, Allan. Val tells herself that she’s going to ignore the voices in her head and will instead enjoy the food on the trip. But early in the trip, not only does she give into the voices, but she gets news that utterly rattles her world. Within hours, she’s on a plane back to her home. The food obsession becomes even harder to manage. 

When everyone from school returns back home, Jordan comes to see Val and Val, wrestling with both her eating disorder and grief, learns Jordan and Allan shared a kiss. She’s seething, thinking that Jordan stole her crush — even though Val never once told Jordan about the crush. In her rage and grief, Val tells Jordan she cannot believe someone like her could ever get a boy to pay attention to her.

Jordan, Val’s best friend, is fat. And now, Val has given Jordan one of the cruelest comments imaginable. 

This book is VERY hard to read, but it is a powerful and moving portrayal of bulimia, grief, and the unique pressures that can come from immigrant parents onto their children. The art in this comic is outstanding, with beautiful color work from Lynette Wong in shades of pastel pink, purple, and green.

Meadowlark, Long Island is a place of wealth, luxury, and sophistication. It’s the home of both Chase and Lia, best friends for life, despite being about as different in personality as can be. Chase overachieves and has future CEO all over her. She’s also extremely depressed. Lia is a free spirit, a wanderer, and Chase’s ex-girlfriend. When Lia disappears, Chase is in the spotlight and Chase is determined to find out what happened.

This is a twisty psychological thriller and explores the realities of grief, trauma, and depression.

Love a timeloop story, a la Groundhog Day? You know I do if you’ve been here a minute. Couch delivers that with a mental health focus in his latest.

Clark keeps waking up and reliving the same Monday. This has happened 309 times…but on day 310, suddenly, there is a new boy in his math class. Things are different.

Given this change, Clark decides he’s going to follow Beau on an adventure through their city of Chicago. If he’s not going to have a different day tomorrow, why wouldn’t he try?

What Clark does not account for is starting to fall for the new guy.

This is a book that follows Clark and his experiences of loneliness and what happens when that’s (temporarily?) interrupted.

Whimsy is back in inpatient care after an attempted suicide. This time, she meets Faery, a boy who, too, is in treatment. She is instantly drawn to him for reasons she can’t quite put her finger on. So when she’s released and learns that Faery and his family have moved to her town and they’ll be attending school together, she’s glad to have someone who “gets” her.

What the two of them share, though, beyond their mental challenges is a fear of the Forest near town. But when they enter and realize there is no way out but through, they encounter a host of Sorrows, as well as characters from global fairy and folk tales, who give them guidance on the path toward understanding Sorrow and trauma. 

This is a complex and magical fantasy in verse about mental illness and trauma. McBride offers a rich and challenging world, while trusting readers to understand that the magic will all make sense.

One of my favorite illustrators, Gemma Correll — who did work in my book, including the cover — illustrates this nonfiction resource for teens about mental health. The book is meant to help offer insight into some of the most common mental health challenges, along with basic self-assessments, to help teens figure out where and how to get help.