H

Recommended reading by the National Mental Health Association. 
 
To his mother, twelve-year-old Benjamin Sherman is an object of pity and anxiety. To his father, he is bizarre and embarrassing. To his psychiatrist, he is a case study in mental illness. To the counselors at the camp where he is spending his summer, Benjamin is a “freaky kid” who shuns his peers and is strangely—and perhaps dangerously—attached to his best friend, Elliot, a stuffed letter H.
 
Through the letters of his sister, mother, father, camp counselors, and psychiatrist—and, most touchingly, through those Benjamin writes to Elliot—this audacious and utterly unsentimental novel gives us a moving and sometimes shocking intimacy with a child whose disorder may be a kind of fragile genius. H is an astute, sympathetic evocation of the state we persist in calling “madness.”
 
“A new and mind-boggling perspective on mental illness from the point of view of the sufferer and those who would love and care about him. . . . H is a very poignant, enthralling debut.”—The Boston Globe
 
“Shepard is a reverse archaeologist, designing a tiny contemporary lost world for readers to excavate. . . . Everything matters. . . Shepard gets everything right.”—New York magazine

YA?This brief epistolary novel is a dazzling melange of letters written by at least 10 different characters, including the eponymous H, a stuffed toy belonging to Benjamin, 12, a borderline autistic child sent to summer camp to learn social skills. To the adult world, Benjamin is excessively withdrawn. In fact, he lives in a world in which the stuffed H is named Elliot and is one of many Elliots, aliens who reside in "Elliottown." Besides revealing the bizarre complexity of the boy's imagination, the letters contrast sharply with the well-meaning but uncompromising missives from the adults in the his life. Shepard uses each letter to reveal not only information, but also the character of the writer; even the absence of communications is often revealing. The cumulative effect is to explain subtly Benjamin's condition. Teens should be amused by the delightful irony and the mildly satirical camp scenes, and will enjoy the unusual freedom of being allowed to infer character.?Chip Barnett, Rockbridge Regional Library, Lexington, VA
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.