Booklist 1-23-06

*STAR* Vizzini, Ned. It’s Kind of a Funny Story. Apr. 2006. 448p. Hyperion, $16.95 (0-7868-5196-1).

When Craig Gilner gets into Manhattan’s exclusive Executive Pre-Professional High School, it’s the culmination of a year of intense focus and grinding hard work. Now he has to actually attend the school with other equally high-performing students. Oops. And so the unraveling begins, with a depressed Craig spending more time smoking dope and throwing up than studying. Although medication helps his depression, he decides to stop taking it. Soon after, he makes another decision: to commit suicide. A call to a suicide hotline gets him into a psychiatric hospital, where he is finally able to face his demons. Readers must suspend their disbelief big time for this to work. Because the teen psych ward is undergoing renovations, Craig is put in with adults, which provides the narrative with an eccentric cast of characters rather than just similarly screwed-up teens. And in his five days in the hospital, Craig manages to cure his eating disorder, find a girlfriend, realize he wants to be an artist, and solve many of his co-residents’ problems, including locating Egyptian music for his roommate, who won’t get out of bed. What could he do if he wasn’t depressed! But what’s best about the book is Craig’s voice––intimate, real, funny, ironic, and one kids will come closer to hear. Many readers will be familiar with the drugs, the sexual experimentation, the language, and, yes, the depression––or they’ll know someone who is. This book offers hope in a package that readers will find enticing, and that’s the gift it offers. ––Ilene Cooper