An overburdened teen embarks on a self-improvement experiment--at times fascinating and hilarious, at others disastrous and heartbreaking--in Dina Havranek's profound and compulsively readable YA debut. Giddy Barber Explodes in 11 is an exemplary portrait of the unsustainability of high expectations, a brilliant look at how depression and stress manifests in teens, and a rallying reminder that they can ask for help.

Fifteen-year-old Giddy Barber does it all. She wakes her 14-year-old brother, Dougal, in time for school. Toasts waffles for her insatiably curious sister, Tigs, age five, and mischievous brother, Tad, age seven. Lets the dog out. Unclogs the toilet. Notes the number of eggs left in the refrigerator (none). Chaperones everyone to the bus stop, then bikes to her school, arriving late. All of this requires a morning meal of bland rice, an antacid, and some ibuprofen, as well as naps in class and strategically half-assed assignments. This mundane everyday has her weighed down by a "nothingness," unable to "remember the last time she smiled." Until she spots a post on a self-help website: "Have you tried opposition therapy?" Giddy, after reading how the therapy suggests doing the opposite of everything one would normally do, decides to give it a try.

For 11 days, Giddy reverses all her habits, leaving a flummoxed Dougal in charge and directing the clever flippancy with which she's approached her worst classes toward her best ones. The fallout is instantaneous. "You can't be depressed!" one of her friends tells her. "That's Jess's thing." Giddy's mother, vexed that Tad and Tigs missed school, wonders aloud, "Do I have to do everything around here?" And for her flattened clay art piece--a "dinner plate"--Giddy earns an F. All she can do is mentally repeat the website's advice: "Do not waver, even though at times you may not like who you become." This last bit, however, comes close to breaking Giddy as she veers toward the titular explosion.

The novel artfully portrays a teen girl at the brink of a breakdown. "There's no reason it always has to be me!" Giddy shouts at one point, exemplifying the frustration teens experience when they must bear responsibilities that they know should not be theirs. Havranek never cartoonishly villainizes Giddy's parents, instead displaying acute cognizance of how parents are often reliant on their competent children. In one gutting scene, Giddy expects her orderly father to attend to her horribly scraped face, "but all he does is hastily slap the bandages on" and return to his computer. Giddy's mother constantly reminds Giddy of all she must do: "keep better track of Dougal"; "Dammit, Giddy... you can't oversleep"; "This thing you're doing, this 'life experiment'... please get it done soon." Her older brother, Jax, who is in college and almost never home, advises, "Just suck it up for a couple of years and you'll be out too." But the word "no" eludes the dutiful Giddy.

Havranek effectively generates an atmosphere of investigation and self-discovery by using a third-person perspective that places the reader at a distance, similar to Giddy, who views herself as an experiment. An action figure named Superdoo that Giddy seeks out after watching an old home video enforces the idea of her examining herself: he breaks constantly and she keeps picking up the pieces and reattaching them. For Giddy, Superdoo, irritatingly abrasive in her pocket or grinning at her with his "eternal can-do attitude," is a reminder that something must change; for the reader, he symbolizes how things keep falling apart when the underlying problem is never fixed.

Giddy is not entirely without support, much of which she discovers through the experiment itself. Her lunch group of in-fighting girls to whom she is nothing "more than text message fodder" is swapped for a more receptive crew, adding beautiful glimmers of budding friendships. Abundant heart also comes from the undeniably adorable Tigs and Tad, a pair of angelic heathens, written into full being.

Havranek's immense attention to every detail begets a novel thoroughly true to life. A refreshing amount of time is spent in the classroom with Giddy, an acknowledgment of the large role school can play in teens' lives. Striking parallels occur between class material and Giddy's struggle. In world history, the teacher speaks of trench warfare, of "how soldiers tried their best at first but slowly tired over time," and Giddy thinks "Why'd they keep trying? Why didn't they just roll over and fall asleep?" She reads Hamlet and "The Yellow Wallpaper" in English and concludes that "maybe if everybody had just shut up and minded their own business for ten minutes, Hamlet and Jane would have come through everything OK. But nobody let them do that!"

Parallels also arise with the opera music Giddy listens to, which syncs with her emotions at critical moments ("She stomps to school to the sonorous rise and fall of the singer's baritone in an aria loaded with ominous foreboding"). Impressive turns of phrase throughout evoke Giddy's keen intellect and shifting ways of thinking ("Her brain's exhaustive leaps of acrobatics fall flat under the repeated thwack of reason and conclusion's gavel"). The result, shown through one girl's emphatically earnest and deeply impactful journey toward figuring herself out, is a reverberant narrative of how depression can waylay the most reliable of teens. Giddy Barber Explodes in 11 is a stirring, sensitive, yet jocular story told with poignancy and heartwarming sincerity. --Samantha Zaboski

Dina Havranek (Jonathan Moonen Photography)

Dina Havranek hails from Houston, Tex., where she teaches science at Timberwood Middle School. A former TV news reporter and local actress, she loves being onstage and has been a speaker at the DFW Writers Conference, where she is a regular attendee. She lives with her husband, her daughter, an out-of-control Lego collection, and a pair of extremely ungrateful cats. Her debut, Giddy Barber Explodes in 11 (Peachtree, October 8, 2024), is a YA novel about a teen overburdened with responsibilities who tries to do the opposite of her normal actions to self-treat her depression.

The writing style--many sentences start with "Giddy" instead of the prose varying more--was a brilliant way of subtly reinforcing Giddy's treatment of herself as an experiment.

Yes, Giddy doesn't know who she is, so I wanted to emotionally distance Giddy from herself. A great way of doing this was by having her repeat her own name as if she were outside herself. It demonstrated someone who isn't in touch with who they really are. I liked using present tense because my experience with teens tells me they very much value the here and now. Everything around them is reacted to immediately and with great emotion.

A lot of Giddy's opposite therapy involves eating foods new to her, as well as unconventional combinations of foods, despite her belief that her stomach can handle only the blandest foods.

I wanted Giddy to eventually explore the idea that maybe her sensitive stomach is a side effect of stress. I made sure to have food upset her stomach the worst when she was tremendously stressed. But I also wanted to demonstrate her darker tendency toward self-harm. Giddy is hypercompetent, and hypercompetent people like to believe they can control every situation--so if they're unhappy, they're really to blame, right? Consequently, Giddy punishes herself with food that she knows, deep down, is going to hurt her. Self-harm is a cry for help and, on some level, Giddy knows she needs to get the attention of her family for that help.

There is imbalance in Giddy's relationships. How does her experiment, despite its hyperbolic nature, allow her to see the need for balance?

Balance is a tough concept for Giddy, so for Giddy to understand that need, you practically have to hit her over the head with it. The skateboard accident, the vomit-inducing food--they're signs of extremes that could have been avoided with moderation (you can slowly learn to skateboard, you can add some spice to food).

Superdoo, an action figure that Giddy cannot remember the reasons for liking, serves as her guide throughout her 11-day experiment. What was the idea behind him?

Hamlet was the inspiration for Superdoo! Hamlet is a character who is constantly being prompted to act. Superdoo is an action figure who pokes Giddy over and over again until she does something to change her life. This is also why I made sure Giddy studied Hamlet in her English class.

Giddy never goes to older brother, Jax (who "made it out") for guidance. Would the story be different without Jax's character?

Jax likely once had all the responsibilities Giddy does now; Giddy just wouldn't have noticed them. Younger siblings are great at noticing when their older siblings bother them, but poor at realizing all the things those older siblings have been tasked with doing around the house. Giddy noticed those responsibilities the second they fell on her.

Had Jax not been around, Giddy would have probably been burdened with running the family at the age of 10 or 11--the ages I currently teach in sixth-grade science. Every year I encounter middle schoolers who are overburdened with the same responsibilities Giddy has.

Is that how you constructed such convincing classroom moments?

I'm fortunate to be a long-time educator and to come from a family of educators. My own daughter also recently completed high school. So, it was fun to portray Giddy's classes in detail.

Why was it important that school be so front-and-center in Giddy's story?

Giddy's life is relentless, and I needed to demonstrate that by showing every second of it. That included her academic responsibilities. Also, each lesson in some way mirrors a lesson Giddy needs to learn. For example, in chemistry, the teacher urges a cautious pace "or you might get something you can't undo." Giddy ignores this advice and barrels straight ahead, suffering consequences for her haste. Hamlet and "The Yellow Wallpaper" in English class contain valuable character references for Giddy to compare herself and her friends with. In history, Giddy learns about a terrible war run by adults who, to her shock, don't know everything, and their incompetence costs millions of people their lives. This leads to her questioning the competency of her own parents. I also never gave Giddy's teachers names--they are all just teachers, icons in her life who could provide assistance if she would listen. Of course, Giddy does not listen. Giddy already knows everything, which is why she is bent on solving all this on her own!

That makes me think of the abundant parallels you drew between the media Giddy consumes (opera, Ulysses, The Guns of August) and the world around her.

Yes. Opera music, Ulysses, and The Guns of August were all new to me and I thoroughly enjoyed learning about them with Giddy. I had fun pairing opera with Giddy's moods because it was a way to pry her emotions to the surface. I only knew my dad hated Ulysses passionately and that I needed Giddy to read a challenging work of literature. So, I read Ulysses as I wrote, reaching all the same milestones in it around the same times Giddy did. Ulysses is a journey, albeit a confusing one, and the depressive cloud surrounding its main protagonist seemed an ideal parallel with Giddy. The Guns of August is a hilariously written look at how some world leaders can be so childish. Giddy needed to understand something vital: adults can be stupid. So, her inability to do everything her mom wants her to do and still be happy isn't really a Giddy fail--it's a mom fail. Failing to impress her history teacher is a teacher fail. For the record, other teachers hate teachers like that guy!

What do you hope readers, especially those who find themselves under pressure like Giddy, take away from reading the novel?

I hope they learn they are not alone. Hypercompetent kids and teens are leaned on and may feel like they are the only ones in their sphere capable of addressing big problems. This can lead to depression and a sense of isolation. They need to know others exist like them and that these problems may not be of their own making--the problems may even be entirely out of their control. --Samantha Zaboski