For a novel that tries to bring to life the difficulty people face in mantaining "mental health" when everything goes wrong for them, this one is much better written than most. Sam, Ben, Abby, and their parents could almost be drawn from life, even though the author specifically says that her family's story of mental problems was different. Early teen readers can probably relate to Sam...though it may put some of them off reading the book if they're warned that, fairly early in the book, Sam loses his right hand.

Almost everything that happens in this story needs a content warning. At the beginning, Sam's family farm has had several low-yield years; Sam's mother worries, when Sam's father leaves taking his gun, that he's thinking about suicide rather than hunting. It turns out later that she's projecting her own feelings onto her husband. In a country renowned for the high median level of alcohol tolerance, Sam's mother appears to be alcohol intolerant. Sam doesn't realize at first that that's why Ben has become so disagreeable...having noticed how much more he resembles his mother's brother-in-law than he does the man he and Sam have always called father. Sam is trying to ease little Abby around the rough edges their elders all seem to have developed when he falls into the moving machinery and wakes up in a hospital. When Ben commits suicide and his girlfriend turns up pregnant, and Sam starts to understand what was on Ben's mind, their mother doesn't *only* attempt suicide. Her part-time job for years has involved sitting with a patient who's hoarded a suicide kit of three pills, and one evening when Sam's father is out she mixes the pills into the "cordials" she serves herself, Sam, and Abby, but luckily one pill is only enough to make an adult ill, and Sam and Abby are feeling too sad to drink theirs. And Sam's girlfriend, though in no danger of being pregnant, reveals that she's a cutter.

What's not to like, if you're prepared to like a story that presents so much distress, is that the story ends where a better story about these characters might begin. They're still only talking about their emotions. I'd like to see them move through their emotions and take some action to change those facts of their real live that are subject to change. There are many good, true stories about people who've moved past the "monsters" of emotional misery and had inspirational lives, but although no biography of Abraham Lincoln, Marie Curie, or dozens of other famous people could leave out the horrors of their early lives, nobody else seems even to have tried to integrate tortured childhood, early struggles, and success story like Maya Angelou.