Description: Signet, 1989. Paperback; states 'first printing'. 252pp.
Condition: Book: Good-plus-plus condition. Binding tight with no creases. Owner name & number on first endpaper, otherwise no apparent notes/underlining observed on text pages. (See my scan/photo.) Cover is bright and shiny, clean, and has two creases on a back corner, one crease to front cover, and edgewear.
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Editorial Reviews
Product Description I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is the story of a sixteen-year-old who retreats from reality into the bondage of a lushly imagined but threatening kingdom, and her slow and painful journey back to sanity.
83 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
I read and loved this book as an adolescent. I recently saw it at the library and decided to take it out and read it again. I just finished re-reading it and found it as powerful as I remembered, possibly even more so.
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden presents a complete picture of mental illness from the patient's point of view, without the stigma of wrongness that is frequently associated with it. The picture painted is a very real one, from Deborah's relief when the doctors confirm what she's known all along, that something is not right, to the way her family deals with the fact of her illness. Greenberg/Green evokes very strong emotions with her writing. You feel Deborah's fear that her secret world of Yr will punish her for revealing its existence to her doctor, and you share in her triumph when she begins to make her way back to the world. I put down this book with a little more understanding of how it must feel to be mentally ill. I would recommend it to anyone, teen or adult.
76 of 77 people found the following review helpful:
Schizophrenia in richly woven detail-Adults read this too!, September 9, 2002
~ ~ ~One thing I've noticed is that most people who have read this book had it recommended to them as an adolescent. If you didn't-read it now! This book is fascinating and extremely well written. Adults will probably have the perspective to enjoy it even more than adolescents do. I first read this book when I was 11,and I didn't quite understand it all, but it was still absorbing and fascinating. I reread it many times over the years, each reading feeling more swept away by Deborah's story. Now I'm 43 years old, an M.D., and I still love this book. ~ ~ ~ The story of Deborah, a 16-year-old schizophrenic young Jewish girl, is told with amazing insight into the delusions and hallucinations of this type of mental illness. At the same time the "unreality" Deborah experiences is described so creatively, and evocatively, and is so rich and textured, that it is very easy to find yourself falling into "her" vision of the world. This is especially true when her rich fantasies are contrasted with the cold, impersonal and randomly cruel life of the hospital (unfortunately I believe this is a very accurate description of even what was a "good" psychiatric hospital in the 1950's). -- Deborah's progress closer to "sanity" contains moments of clarity and connection so beautifully described, they can still bring me close to tears. ~~~~ If I could recommend only one book in the whole of Amazon.com: this would be the one!
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
Schizophrenia in richly woven detail-Adults read this too!, March 16, 2002
One thing I've noticed is that most people who've read this book, read it first as an adolescent. If you didn't-read it now! This book is fascinating and extremely well written. Adullts will probably have the perspective to enjoy it even more than adolescents do. I first read this book when I was 11,and I didn't quite understand it all, but it caught me up, and I reread it many times over the years, each reading feeling more swept away by by Deborah's story. Now I'm 43 years old, an M.D., and I still love this book. The story of Deborah, a 16 y.o. schizophrenic young jewish girl, is told with amazing insight into the delusions and hallucinations of this type of mental illness. At the same time the "unreality" Deborah experiences is described so creatively, and evocatively, and is so rich and textured, that it is very easy to find yourself falling into "her" vision of the world. This is especially true when her rich fantasies are contrasted with the cold, impersonal and randomly cruel life of the hospital(unfortunately I believe this is a very accurate description of even what was a "good" pyschiatric hospital in the 1950's). Deborah's progress closer to "sanity" contains moments of clarity and connection so beautifully described, they can still bring me close to tears. If I could recommend only one book in the whole of Amazon.com: this would be the one!
Schizophrenia is a disorder much more bizarre and incomprehensible to the healthy person than depression and other forms of neurosis. Likewise, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Joanne Greenberg's startling story of a sixteen-year-old schizophrenic, is, despite its frilly title, much more intense and baroque than the Bell Jar, Girl Interrupted and most other titles on the bookshelf of novels featuring young women's struggles with mental illness. While the protagonists of the former novels undeniably faced gray, discouraging, slanted views of the world around them, reality for Rose Garden's Deborah Blau is something unrecognizable and alarming. Sometime during her childhood of alienation and physical sickness, the kingdom of Yr somehow developed within her mind. The Yri gods invited Deborah to escape the frustrating dimension of Earth and fly through Yr's wide-open skies, dance through its golden fields and speak its poetic language. As she grew older, Deborah became a captive of her imagination, blacking out; assaulting others and cutting and burning herself upon its whim. As Deborah enters an asylum, Ms. Greenberg masterfully takes readers behind the mask of this compulsively fascinating, deeply disturbed young woman. It may be impossible for a healthy person to completely imagine inner workings of someone like Deborah's mind, but this outstanding, somewhat psychedelic-flavored novel gives a startling, unforgettable speculative glimpse.
I first read this book about 30 years ago and loved it then. For a long time I made a point to read this novel again at least once per year, but have not done so for a while. I recently re-read it again and was once again struck by the poignancy and richness of the story. A young girl, Deb, is diagnosed as having schizophrenia, an illness where she lives in her own mental world complete with its own beauty, language, friendship--and punishment. Deb's struggle to become "normal" again leaves us cheering for her as she struggles with the "beings" in this make-believe world--and the other remarkable real life mental patients she encounters along the way. The devastation of mental illness, particularly schizophrenia, is realisticly and sympathetically portrayed in this book. You will never forget Deb, her doctor, or fellow patients. This is one of the absolute best books I have ever read--again and again.
Deborah is sixteen years old and for years has known that something is not right with her. She always feels isolated from others, unable to make friends and to make good connections with the world. Her parents like to pretend that everything is fine, though, and nothing is wrong with her at all. They have a status to keep up, and having something wrong with their daughter would reflect badly on them. But finally Deborah is so sure something is wrong, she has to do something about it. She makes a feeble attempt to kil herself by giving herself small cuts on her wrist. The result of this cry for help is a stay in a mental hospital, where she is finally able to meet with a doctor who will help her to figure out what is wrong and how she can go about fixing it.
This story follows Deborah's thoughts as well as the thoughts of her doctor, an older woman who has never seen a patient as young as Deborah but who thinks she will be able to help. Through their therapy sessions, the doctor learns that Deborah has been living her entire existence in a fantasy world that exists in her own mind, with its own language, gods, rules, and logic. The doctor's challenge then becomes to teach Deborah about the real world around her, so she will be able to decide whether she wants to continue to live in this fantasy of her own creation or to live in the real world with other people.
It was fascinating to read about a fantasy world that was so vivid, it could overshadow reality. I felt like I gained a better understanding of how terrifying and disorienting a disease like schizophrenia would be. Although I don't know how realistic the treatment aspect of this book was, I liked the mental illness descriptions.
this story is told in a very believable way. you actually get into the head of a schizophrenic girl as the author write about Deborah's world. there is no propaganda or pitches for sympathy, no "sensational drama" to exaggerate things, no melodrama. just real stuff, feelings, experiences. honest. i identified with Deborah a lot. its awesome, the story is an artfully told progression from intense sickness and submersion in an unreal world to a gradual scary world of hopefulness. awesome. READ IT!
Deborah Blau is a sixteen year-old girl who believes that she is no longer a part of our world. Instead, she is a citizen of Yr, a world ruled by the god Anterrberrae and Lactameon, with a choir known as the Collect and a Censor who keeps her from spilling the secrets of Yr to those in our world. She is sent by her parents and doctors to live at a psychiatric institution, where she will spend the next three years working with a competent psychiatrist, attempting to unravel the secrets and reconstruct the painful past which led her to release her grip on reality.
This book is set in the 1940's, so a lot of the methods and treatments used (i.e. the cold sheet "pack) are probably out-dated. It is interesting though, to see psychotherapy at work, and the impact which environment and upbringing played in Deborah's illness. The expectations thrust upon her by her immigrant Polish grandfather, a self-made man; the teasing of classmates due to her Jewish heritage; miscommunications and terror during surgery for a childhood tumor, came together to force her to mistrust and withdraw from the world into a land of her own creation.
The book is well-written and seems to be very accurate for its time-period. The glimpse we get into Deborah's world is both genuine and terrifying. However, there is a sparseness about this book which makes it hard to find engrossing. First of all, one feels very distant from the main character, Deborah, herself. All of the secondary characters (the psychiatrist, parents, patients, staff) seem to lack emotion, and the interactions between them are hard to find realistic; none of them seem to be real people. Perhaps this is a deft portrayal of a schizophrenic, but it does not necessarily make for pleasant reading. I also found the psychiatrist's coaching to be a bit errant. While upbringing definitely plays a part in schizophrenia, there is also evidence of an imbalance of the neurotransmitter, dopamine. This was not mentioned in the story. A great deal of Deborah's behavior was not explained. I found myself getting impatient as I reached the half-way point of the book. It seemed two hundred and fifty pages was a bit much to describe Deborah's world. Overall, though, this is a worthy reference depicting the life of a schizophrenic teenager, what caused her illness, and how it is reacted to and changed by those around her.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Young adult reading about a mentally ill 16-year-old girl who endures 3 years in a mental hospital. The story is told mostly from Deborah Blau's, the 16-year-old girl, point of view.
Deborah's mental illness established early in her life due to pent up rage, frustration, and the pain of not being accepted in life, among other things. Because of this rejection by the world, she created in her mind Yr, a fantasy land where she could escape the harsh realities of life, but Yr slowly turned into a place none-too-nice that held her captive in her mind.
I loved this book for the simple fact that we're allowed to see things from Deborah's point of view. Few books do that. Usually, we're presented with a view from someone who's sane, thus sealing the prejudices and pity associated with the mentally ill. People tend to forget that the patients are still human, preferring to ostracize them because of their state-of-mind. This story presents the patients at people, and they are surprisingly astute and introspective despite their illness, and they are aware of what people who don't have an illness thinks of them.
Deborah's story is a fascinating one. She works with a gifted psychiatrist to overcome Yr and its gods, which hurts her when she tries to tell the secrets of their world. We follow her sickness, her stages of recovery, and her eventual reintroduction to the world. It was nice to read a book that wasn't a horror that presented a view of mental illness. My lack to rate it higher comes from the fact that parts of the book were lacking in my opinion, but that doesn't void out the fact that book was a good read.
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