The Memory of Light
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4.5 • 12 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
This beautiful novel from the author of Marcelo in the Real World about life after a suicide attempt is perfect for fans of It's Kind of a Funny Story and Thirteen Reasons Why.When Vicky Cruz wakes up in the Lakeview Hospital Mental Disorders ward, she knows one thing: After her suicide attempt, she shouldn't be alive. But then she meets Mona, the live wire; Gabriel, the saint; E.M., always angry; and Dr. Desai, a quiet force. With stories and honesty, kindness and hard work, they push her to reconsider her life before Lakeview, and offer her an acceptance she's never had.But Vicky's newfound peace is as fragile as the roses that grow around the hospital. And when a crisis forces the group to split up, sending Vicky back to the life that drove her to suicide, she must try to find her own courage and strength. She may not have them. She doesn't know.Inspired in part by the author's own experience with depression, The Memory of Light is the rare young adult novel that focuses not on the events leading up to a suicide attempt, but the recovery from one -- about living when life doesn't seem worth it, and how we go on anyway.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Vicky Cruz, 16, "put on strong every morning," trying to please her demanding father, a emotionally stunted man who married his assistant shortly after the death of his wife, six years earlier. But when Vicky's father summarily fires her beloved, arthritic nanny, paying for her to return to Mexico, Vicky surrenders to the "soul pain" she has felt for years and swallows a bottle of her stepmother's sleeping pills. Stork writes sensitively about Vicky's journey from near death to shaky recovery, discussing his own experience with depression in an afterword. Awakening in a public hospital's psych ward, Vicky attends group therapy with patients who have a catalogue of disorders, and learns from them to value her strengths. Various studies have estimated that perhaps as many as one in five teens has a diagnosable mental health problem; it's a subject that needs the discussion Stork's potent novel can readily provide. Vicky isn't healed, but she finds a reason to keep living, and that constitutes progress worth celebrating. Ages 12 up.
