The View From Who I Was

Gr 9 Up—Wealthy, beautiful high school senior Oona Antunes gets good grades, has a loving boyfriend, and hangs with the popular crowd, yet she flees the Winter Formal dance and lays down to die in the Colorado cold. Rescued and revived, she loses some fingers and toes to frostbite and struggles to make sense of the pain behind her suicide attempt. Unfortunately, readers will also struggle, since Oona's distant relationship with her parents, and the envy she engenders in her classmates, seem to be the only sources of conflict in an otherwise smooth life. Told in brooding first person by Oona's disembodied soul (a clunky device that never quite coheres), the rest of the book is a jumble of high school drama, Oona's physical and psychological recovery, and intergenerational tragedy. A big reveal about Oona's father near the end of the book comes across as far-fetched rather than providing insight into the family dynamic. The self-consciously literary writing is heavy on metaphor and cliché, sapping Oona's story of emotional immediacy. Furthermore, Latino and Native American characters play stereotypical roles in helping European-American Oona to heal. For example, a Navajo teen gives Oona an eagle feather to acknowledge her strength. Much better books about teen mental illness and suicide exist: try Ned Vizzini's It's Kind of a Funny Story (Hyperion, 2006), Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now (Random, 2004), Jay Asher's 13 Reasons Why (Penguin, 2007), or Leila Sales's This Song Will Save Your Life (Farrar, 2013) instead.—Sarah Stone, San Francisco Public Library