Review: Good Title - Needs a Better Book
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 04 13, 2014
A great title, but this book is certainly not for everyone.  If you’re not interested in the problems of mental illness or if being in a psychiatric hospital bothers you, then get a different book.  If such topics intrigue you, then keep reading.Author Tara Allred has a good grasp of the basics of mental disorder, but her descriptions are often awkward.  Her conversations are stilted and overly detailed.  Maybe that’s the way her “philosopher/psychologist father and artist mother” talked at home, but the lengthy, detailed conversations between the psychotherapist and his patient were quite unreal, more like a classroom discussion, which frequently made me question if I was reading a novel or a psychology textbook.  Certainly these conversations were not like the crisp, blunt dialogue I have encountered in psychiatric hospitals.Even so, Tara has adequately painted a word-portrait of the mental health professional who realizes that such work is more art than science and is always and ever “practicing” a healing ministry.  Credit Tara for her insights into the mind of the psychologist, for her main character, psychologist John Sanders, is typical of many who enter such work as a spin-off from their own struggle for self-understanding.On the other hand, dating the story is confusing.  The diagnosis of one patient was done through DSM-II (there have been at least 2 revisions published since DSM-II).  Then another patient was diagnosed with “bipolar disorder” (but DSM-II did not use that term, and any professional using the DSM-II would instead have used the term “manic-depressive illness”).There were typical grammatical problems, like “I’m different ‘than’ the rest.…”  Anyone with as much education as the main character had would know the correct expression is “different ‘from’….”  And the author relied too much on her computer’s spell-checker, as in using “patience” instead of “patients.”I really would like to give the book a better rating, because the author as obviously worked hard at presenting a meaningful story about a critically important topic, but it needs a dose of reality to make it work.I give it 2 stars.