Perfect Parker Fadley isn’t so perfect anymore. She’s quit the cheerleading squad, she’s dumped her perfect boyfriend, and she’s failing school. Her parents are on a constant suicide watch and her counselors think she’s playing games…but what they don’t know, the real reason for this whole mess, isn’t something she can say out loud. It [...]

Tags: guilt, high schools, interpersonal relations, secrets, suicide, trailer
Filed under: Book Review

Owen, Frank, Audrey, and Jin-Ae have one thing in common: they all want to die. When they meet online after each attempts suicide and fails, the four teens make a deadly pact: they will escape together on a summer road trip to visit the sites of celebrity suicides…and at their final destination, they will all [...]

Tags: depression, drugs, emotional problems, family problems, grief, road trip, self-esteem, sex, suicide
Filed under: Book Review

dear caitlin, there are so many things that i want so badly to tell you but i just can’t. Devastating, hopeful, hopeless, playful . . . in words and illustrations, Ingrid left behind a painful farewell in her journal for Caitlin. Now Caitlin is left alone, by loss and by choice, struggling to find renewed [...]

Tags: bereavement, friendship, grief, psychological fiction, suicide
Filed under: Book Review

When this book was published in 1774, it inspired a mass cult of feelings (and reputedly a few suicides) and made its author one of the first literary celebrities. It is a story of a tormented young man whose fixation on an inaccessible woman culminates in tragedy may be read as a celebration of unfettered [...]

Tags: depression, epistolary novels, psychological fiction, suicide
Filed under: Book Review

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is the story of Esther Greenwood’s nervous breakdown and repeated suicide attempts, a story rather similar to Plath’s own. Greenwood’s depression is apparent early during her time interning at a magazine. Throughout the novel, her condition only worsens, leading to hospitalizations and numerous psychiatric ward commitments. During her internship, Esther [...]

Tags: depression, psychological fiction, suicide
Filed under: Book Review