Panicked! Under Rose-Tainted Skies by Louise Gornall

"Ready?" Mom asks. "Just keep breathing"

I'm drowning. "Mom." I snatch her arm, hold it tight to my chest like it's a buoy. I won't make it to the car. Exhaustion hits like a Mack truck. And then, just because the panic attack hasn't quite finished screwing me six ways from Sunday, the spasms start. Arms up, legs twitch. A tortured heaving sound makes my skeleton jerk. I can't stop it. At least I don't pass out this time. That's the worst, especially if there's no one around to catch you.

That's only happened to me once. Back then I didn't know what a panic attack was. Mrs. Dawson asked me a question in chem class, and my mind went blank. Everyone's eyes were on me. My vision started to wobble. Like when the heat rises off the desert floor and smudges the landscape, everything was out of focus. The next thing I knew I was waking up in the ER, a set of staples running down my forehead. Things got really bad from there.

In her first year of high school, Norah had a panic attack which left her with a full-blown case of agoraphobia complicated by obsessive compulsive disorder. Soon she can't leave her room unless her four cushions are lined up precisely on her perfectly-made bed and all her books are stacked by perfectly aligned sizes. Trips to see her psychologist usually end in an attack that requires Dr. Reeves to meet with her in the car.

But Norah likes to watch what goes on outside from the open door, and one day she watches a new family moving in next door, with an incredibly handsome boy, and she realizes she can't take her eyes off of him whenever he is outside.

Something warm fizzes like seltzer in my stomach as I watch him through the window.

And when her Mom has to be out of town, Norah finds herself unable even to retrieve the ordered groceries delivered to her back door, and she is surprised when he knocks and offers to bring them in. Apparently, he has seen her at the door trying to reach them and cheerfully carries them in. He is nice and funny, explaining that his mom made him come over and reassure them that he doesn't have a motorcycle or play drums all night. Norah is able to talk and joke with him. And for the first time in a long while, around Luke she feels normal.

Over time, waves from the doorway become texts back and forth, and eventually Norah is able to spend an evening watching movies with Luke. Against all odds, he seems to accept her, phobias and all, and to see her differently from the way she sees herself.

And then one movie night, after she has allowed Luke to touch her hand, he kisses her, and she recoils, visions of deadly bacteria in that kiss.

"Leave me alone!" I try to yell, but it comes out small, a tremor tearing through.

It's over, her time of feeling almost normal. Norah hates herself and her shrinking world even more now that she is really alone in a way she wasn't before Luke.

But then, when Mom is again away on business, the worst thing that can happen happens. Norah wakens suddenly in the middle of the night.

I notice the faintest glow of silver moonlight seeping out of a crack in Mom's door. Then there's a bump, and a single note from Mom's musical jewelry box rings out.

There's someone in my house.

The intruder will be coming to her bedroom next, Norah knows. And she knows what she has to do, must do.

"I have to leave the house."

Louise Gornall's forthcoming Under Rose-Tainted Skies (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Clarion, 2017) has it all--a self-aware, funny and phobic heroine whose courage matches her fears and a love story of two people drawn to each other despite it all. The strength of this young adult novel lies in the honest first-person narration of Gornall's character Norah, who takes the reader inside the constrained world of an agoraphobic with a sensitive but insightful description of her closely constrained world. Even with the somewhat ex machina ending which has Norah face the very worst of her fears, ironically to find real safety outside, this is a highly believable novel written in witty and elegant prose, with a promise of hope for Norah at the end of her flight from fear.

Trust No One, Not Even Yourself: We'll Never Be Apart by Emiko Jean

I found Cellie crouched in the backyard, a pile of wadded newspapers and dry grass at her feet. A book of matches was in her hand.

"Don't, Cellie." Jason went and stood by her side. "I don't want this," I said to him. He looked baffled.

"What about what he did to us? Don't you still see Roman in your dreams?" he said to me.

"What he did to us was awful. But this isn't the way, Jason. We have to forgive, to forget, to move on. You don't want to do this. I know it. This isn't you."

His upper lip curled. "You don't know shit about me." Cellie struck her match first, inhaling deeply at the explosion of sulfur. She handed the matchbook to Jason and he struck one as well.

"Please," I begged. But they didn't listen. Together they held the matches aloft and dropped them.

Alice Monroe is found by her neighbor on her third birthday, in the house where her grandfather had been dead for three days. Alice is left, with her twin Celia, to stay with the next-door neighbors, while the police search for relatives. But Alice watches, frightened, as her sister sets fires and becomes violent, and soon they are taken away from the kindly Mr. and Mrs. Chan and sent to a succession of temporary foster parents and group homes, until, with a boy named Jason, they become the virtual prisoners of the cruel Roman, who rousts them from sleep to beat them almost nightly. Eventually they are removed from Roman's custody, but Jason's desire for revenge only grows stronger as they grow older.

And when they are arrested for Roman's death in the fire, Alice and Cellie are sent to Savage Isle, an institution for mentally disturbed teens. Out on bail and waiting his trial, Jason finds a way to help them escape and takes them to hide out in an abandoned country barn. But jealous of Alice's closeness with Jason, Cellie throws a lighted lantern into the bales of hay in the loft, and Jason dies in the fire. Alice survives and sees herself and Cellie returned to Savage Isle.

Charged with arson and with Jason's murder, Alice is on probation with the general patient population, but when her twin seems not to be there, Alice assumes she is confined to D Ward, the section for seriously disturbed patients. She becomes convinced that she will never be free as long as her sister is alive, and forms a close relationship with Chase, who agrees to help her get into D Ward to find her twin without knowing that Alice is planning her murder. But as Alice comes to love and perhaps trust Chase, her will to kill begins to fade.

Emiko Jean's Gothic thriller, We'll Never Be Apart (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) has the taut immediacy of relationships of, say, one of John Green's famous teen novels, heightened by the psyche-destroying circumstances of Alice's ruined childhood. But just as Alice's fear and hate for her evil twin seems to losing its power over her, she discovers her own medical file hidden in Chase's room, and she learns the truth about herself that she has never understood.

This is an absorbing story of sad realities and compelling fantasies, but where author Jean works her writerly magic is in the way she uses dualities--Alice's first person narrative of events as they occur, her journal's remembrances of those events, and the dimly glimpsed truth, the fiction within a fiction, that takes readers into Alice's psychotic delusions so convincingly that we too are shaken by the sudden revelation of Alice's dual selves and left off-balance by the novel's ambiguous ending--both of them. It's quite a tour de force, a searing young adult novel that is hard to forget.

When the Nest Falls: Nest by Esther Ehrlich

"Now, don't push yourself, Hannah," Dad said, but Mom was already walking toward the water with her long, slow dancer steps and her dark, twisty dancer bun.

"Here I go," she said, dipping in before Dad could catch her and finish his lecture. She swam underwater all the way to the rope at the other side of the shallow area and then started doing laps.

"Bravo!" Dad yelled from shore.

"Bravo!" Rachel and I yelled, but Dad shushed us and said that Mom preferred not to draw attention to herself.

"But, Dad,"I said, " you're the one who--" But he was already sprinting toward Mom, just in case her leg decided to give her more of that new nasty business.

Rachel had her fake smile on, which means she's upset but won't admit it.

Life has been good for eleven-year-old Naomi, called "Chirp" for her fascination with birds, and good for her family. Her thirteen-year-old sister Rachel still condescends to make up new dances with her, and her psychologist Dad is easy going and loving. But it is their beautiful and creative mother, Hannah, who is the center of the family, and when she receives a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, she withdraws and falls into a depression so deep that Dad has her hospitalized for psychiatric care. Even after electroshock treatments and a visit home, the trajectory is downhill, and finally Hannah turns to suicide in the nearby pond, their pond, where Chirp has watched for the ruby-throated loon and both girls had learned to swim.

I pull my pink rug into the corner. I shove my desk over to make a triangle with the wall with just enough space for me to crawl in. I get my pillow and red wool blanket and white quilt and Eggie, my yellow Therma-Weave off my bed. All of my Danskin shirts and pants, the purple ones and yellow ones and green ones. I drag everything in. My pillow goes in the middle. Then all of my clothes in a circle.

A nest should be well constructed. It should keep you warm even when there are strong gusts. It can't just fall apart.

With the loss of Hannah, the family seems to be falling apart. Chirp retreats to her nest whenever she can. Rachel fights with her father constantly, and then abruptly switches to siding with him and fighting with Chirp. Her heart-broken dad tries ineffectually to hold them together. And Chirp herself flounders, at home and at school, and only finds some release when she and Joey, a boy with abusive brothers and father who lives nearby, decide to run away to Boston with nothing more than a vague plan to ride the swan boats in the Public Gardens. Chirp pins her hopes upon finding the same boat with the same driver than she and her mom had ridden together the last summer, but when she asks if he remembers her mother, the driver's blank look just confirms the realization that her mother is really gone, disappearing from memory already.

But Chirp's flight shows her how much she needs what is left of her family, those with whom she shares her memories, in Esther Ehlich's Nest (Random House, 2014). Ehlich's narrative is lyrical and full of details and symbols which reinforce the story of loss, death, grief, and family strength, and Chirp is a remarkable voice, honest and totally stricken with the sudden loss of her family's anchor.

Although the story is told in Chirp's voice, the characters are so well drawn that each reveals his or her own story clearly. This is a novel that touches on family relationships in depth--a remarkably drawn story made more vivid, like To Kill a Mockingbird, as seen through the eyes of a young girl. "A stunning debut, with lyrical prose and superbly developed characters. . . . Readers will savor Nest and reflect on it long after its conclusion," says School Library Journal's starred review. And Horn Book adds , "Chirp’s first-person voice is believable; her poignant earnestness is truly heartrending. Ehrlich writes beautifully, constructing scenes with grace and layers of telling detail and insight."

Greek Tragedy: Crazy by Han Nolan

Shelby starts again. "My mother wants me to help her die."

I feel Shelby's hand claw my back and grab my shirt as though she were looking for something to hold on to, to save her and keep her from falling into that terrible place where those kinds of thoughts live, but I know there is no holding on, not for any of us. We have become, through no fault of our own, these falling bodies. Just like O'Hagan's odd mathematical equations for falling bodies, and as scary as that is, sitting here with Shelby, Pete, and Haze makes me feel for the first time that I'm not alone. At least we are all falling through space together.

Jason Papadopoulos is alone. His mom had died eight months before after a sudden stroke on a hike with Jason, and since that time his father has drifted back into the mental illness he's fought all this adult life, believing that he is being pursued constantly by the Furies of mythology. Knowing that he is the only person who can induce his father to eat and take the few medications they can afford, Jason struggles to hide their predicament from his neighbors and his school. Without his father's income, their house is deteriorating around them and there is no money for winter heat and little for food, much less shoes and haircuts. Jason loved his mother, but now he struggles to suppress his resentment of her for leaving him to deal with his father's increasingly scary madness, and he is haunted by an almost-repressed memory of his father's insane attempt to bury him alive at the age of six.

Jason's only companions are what he calls the "Greek chorus" which speak to him from inside his own head.

Ever since the fifth grade, I've had this imaginary audience in my head who follow me around and watch me like I'm the star in a movie. I talk to them, and yeah, they talk to me, although I know they aren't really there.

Jason's chorus gives him what he needs. There's Fat Bald Guy with a Mustache, the voice of know-it-all middle-aged wisdom, Aunt Bea from The Andy Griffith show, all motherly solicitude, Sexy Lady, who tells him he's both cool and hot, and Crazy Glue, a teen slangster with a running ironic commentary on everything. But even his personal chorus is not enough to keep Jason's anxiety from spilling over into occasional erratic behavior, like writing his social studies exam without capital letters, spaces between words, or punctuation.

The school places Jason in a support group, led by school psychologist Mrs. Gomez, with three other students with equally difficult family problems, Haze and Pete, and also Shelby, whose mother is dying of ALS. Initially resentful and determined to conceal his own problems for fear of being removed from his home but frightened by his father's physical deterioration during an illness, Jason turns to his friends for help. They respond supportively, but when Mrs. Gomez is brought into the medical intervention, the situation becomes obvious to her and Jason is placed against his will with a foster family. His time there begins terribly when he is stabbed by another foster child who resents sharing his room, and Jason then learns that he is to be denied the right even to check on his father when he is released for lack of insurance to go back home alone.

Jason's Greek chorus fails him in these circumstances, but his new friends from the group do not, and when Shelby's mother dies, sharing her wild and deep grief somehow brings a kind of catharsis to Jason and he experiences his own grief fully. When he does, he begins to recognize his deep anger at his parents' seeming abandonment of him, and to forgive both them and himself.

I recall the dream--the ocean, the darkness, a chilling terror.... I'm fighting, struggling to breathe, to break free...but wait--no, it's not me. That's not me down there. It's Dad. Dad's the one buried alive--my dad, my brilliant dad, buried beneath a craziness he can't break free of or control.

It isn't me at all.

Han Solo's forthcoming Crazy (Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt, 2010) is a moving psychological coming-of-age novel in which the not-quite-fifteen year-old protagonist comes to realize that he is not alone, that his parents' sad destiny need not be his own. As his friend Shelby puts it, Jason can be the good that comes out of his parent's tragedy. This is a complex novel, made understandable by the running commentary of Jason's chorus, an emotional roller coaster ride for the reader, all with the difficult theme that as long as we are alive, we can be more than the sum of our past.