I saw this book while at the library one day and was curious to read it. I have read Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by the same author, pretty much my favourite memoir of all that I have read. This is her first and so far only fictional novel release so I didn't know if it would be good or bad, luckily for me I got a pleasant surprise.
The novel details a family which has every chance of falling apart after a father kills himself, his wife must come to terms with the incident, his 12 year old son has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years and his 6 year old daughter is desperately trying to hold her family together. It is written in their three different viewpoints and Hornbacher manages to capture both their ages and their statuses within the family beautifully. At first I thought it was going to be a really depressing book but it really said a lot about the feeling of grief, the disbelief, the sadness, the falling and the picking back up again.
Hornbacher also seems to understand mental illness very well, I was to find out it is actually because she suffers from bipolar disorder herself. She didn't also do what a lot of memoir-switched-fiction writers do: she didn't include her own experiences so much that the book was sort of like a biography even if it wasn't one but still managed to make the family realistic and heartwarming. Her writing reminds me of a cross between Margaret Atwood and someone else, not quite as literary as Atwood I suppose but beautiful all the same.
I give this book my highest 5-star recommendation.
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