The first thing 16-year-old Vicky Cruz thinks about when she wakes from her failed suicide attempt is that she still wants the silence the sleeping pills promised.
Vicky, the privileged Mexican American daughter of a local Austin, Tex., developer, finds herself in the Lakeview Hospital psychiatric ward with three other teens who are "failures at the thing called living": her roommate, the wild and blunt Mona who aches to find her little sister who's been taken away by social services; sweet, philosophical Gabriel, who mows lawns for his grandfather's business; and hard-talking E.M., a young man with a shaved, "rocklike head" and massive tattooed muscles who works in construction. In their group therapy sessions with the thoughtful but persistent Dr. Desai, as well as in their informal daily conversations, the four patients push each other to be both honest and kind with themselves as they go through the process of recovery from their respective mental illnesses.
Vicky struggles to find her place in her family of bootstrap-pulling overachievers and to confront her guilt about "having everything" but still feeling miserable. It's Gabriel who helps her realize that she does like things... swimming and roses and writing, for starters. What makes The Memory of Light exceptional is the delicate, deft way Mexican American author Francisco X. Stork (Irises, Marcelo in the Real World) handles depression. One truth begins to come through: life--and death--is messy. When, inevitably, things start to blow up again for the four, Vicky's fragile new self-perception and growing strength are put to the test. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor