December 1, 2018
A highly intelligent teen lays out all the reasons she has been wrongly accused of a crime.Hannah knows it's a mistake that she's been institutionalized. She and her friend Agnes were just playing games, and it's a terrible tragedy that Agnes fell out of a second-story window. All Hannah wants is to be at her friend's bedside, but instead she's stuck in this mental institution being questioned daily by Dr. Lightfoot and kept separate from all the other patients. It's not until she gains a roommate, Lucy, that Hannah begins to connect with someone, and soon she is allowed small excursions out of her room for lunch and showers. Finally she has someone she can take care of and guide, as she did Agnes, while she waits for the error of her involuntary commitment to be rectified. She's confident that everything will be taken care of soon. It becomes clear early on that something is off about Hannah's account of the summer school program where she met Agnes, who later became her best friend, and about the night Agnes fell. It's just a question of exactly which parts of her story we can trust and which we can't. Hannah is white by default (as is Agnes) and Jewish, Lucy is coded Latinx, and there is some diversity in secondary characters.Not an astoundingly surprising plot but a respectful, authentic rendering of mental illness and treatment nonetheless. (Thriller. 14-18)

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December 1, 2018
Grades 9-12 Hannah has always been the perfect child other parents envied. She's brilliant, confident, and in control. So she knows she shouldn't have been institutionalized, in a place where she has to wear paper pajamas and earn shower privileges, after her best friend's tragic accident. It's an injustice she's determined to point out to the judge at her hearing. In the meantime, she works on becoming her roommate Lucy's best friend, so that she can show how not dangerous she is, while manipulating the incompetent staff. This compelling character study begins like a thriller?the mystery of what happened to her friend Agnes draws considerable suspense?but once Hannah is diagnosed with schizophrenia, it becomes a nuanced exploration of mental illness. Hannah's tight, first-person perspective is ideal for this shift in tone, as it makes her real life and her delusions difficult to distinguish. Hannah's bittersweet return to reality, where she grieves people she lost, both real and imagined, and confronts the future of managing her illness, is hard-won and ends in an uncomfortable, but realistic, place of uncertainty.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from December 1, 2018

Gr 10 Up{amp}mdash;Hannah Gold knows that there has been a terrible misunderstanding. She spent an enjoyable several weeks at a college summer program in California, where she formed a tight friendship with her roommate, Agnes. Now she is being carefully monitored and denied basic privileges at a high security institution. While she goes through the events of the past few weeks in her head, she tries to make sense of the tragic accident that sent Agnes falling two stories to the concrete below their dorm window. Although Hannah had been secretly seeing Agnes's boyfriend, Jonah, she knows that she would never have done anything to harm Agnes physically. Through conversations with her therapist, brief interactions with other inmates, and constant internal dialogue, Hannah analyzes her privileged childhood as an only child of wealthy parents in New York City, and wonders if she is not the person she always thought she was. Sheinmel creates an intensely likable unreliable narrator. Hannah's voice is convincingly realistic, highlighting the subtle nuances that make up the thought processes of a troubled teenager. Though the novel centers on the theme of mental illness and its devastating consequences, it is fully engaging and manages to avoid being too gloomy. The author's beautiful prose strikes a perfect balance between serious emotion and humorous dialogue. VERDICT A thrilling page-turner and worthy choice for high school libraries.{amp}mdash;Karin Greenberg, Manhasset High School, Manhasset, NY

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