Off the Rails

May 15, 2018

With two healthy children and rewarding careers, educator and communications expert Burrowes and husband Paul were shocked when, within only a few months, their lives were thrown into upheaval as daughter Hannah's ordinary teen moodiness shifted into vicious anger. "If she's willing to hit me, what else is she capable of," asks Burrowes at the start of this often disturbing, raw, and uncut account written from both the author's and Hannah's perspectives. Readers follow Hannah as she's admitted to a psychiatric hospital then completes progressive treatments at the Second Nature Wilderness Family Therapy program and comes to understand Austrian neurologist Viktor Frankl's idea that "caring is the last human freedom." After Hannah completes a strict regimen at the wilderness program, she is treated at a residential center. Burrowes reflects on the experience: "when you have a child in treatment, everything you see, hear, and do is filtered through a lens of frustration, failure, and shame. Readers will appreciate Hannah's final move toward redemption when Hannah returns home and healing begins. VERDICT A powerful work of unfiltered truth about addiction, mother-daughter relationships, and the importance of working together.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2018

With two healthy children and rewarding careers, educator and communications expert Burrowes and husband Paul were shocked when, within only a few months, their lives were thrown into upheaval as daughter Hannah's ordinary teen moodiness shifted into vicious anger. "If she's willing to hit me, what else is she capable of," asks Burrowes at the start of this often disturbing, raw, and uncut account written from both the author's and Hannah's perspectives. Readers follow Hannah as she's admitted to a psychiatric hospital then completes progressive treatments at the Second Nature Wilderness Family Therapy program and comes to understand Austrian neurologist Viktor Frankl's idea that "caring is the last human freedom." After Hannah completes a strict regimen at the wilderness program, she is treated at a residential center. Burrowes reflects on the experience: "when you have a child in treatment, everything you see, hear, and do is filtered through a lens of frustration, failure, and shame." Readers will appreciate Hannah's final move toward redemption when she returns home and healing begins. VERDICT A powerful work of unfiltered truth about addiction, mother-daughter relationships, and the importance of working together.-Julia M. Reffner, North Chesterfield, VA

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 25, 2018
In this fast-moving debut memoir, Burrowes traces her family’s attempts to treat her troubled teenage daughter Hannah’s drug addiction and violent behavior. After being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, cutting off the heads of her sister’s stuffed animals, and accidentally overdosing on lithium, Hannah, her parents realized, required intense care. Burrowes felt her daughter, then in ninth grade, needed to be treated away from home, and she and her husband sent Hannah to a program in Utah, where she spent three months camping in the desert; she stayed in Utah to finish high school in a supervised residential home. Eventually, Burrowes and her husband learned that Hannah’s behavior had been caused by ecstacy use, and that she was not bipolar; Hannah later graduated from college, but the family’s “happy ending” left them “scarred and battle-weary.” Each chapter is split into multiple sections, told in the present tense from both mother and daughter perspectives, though Burrowes wrote both; she notes that with Hannah’s permission, she recreated events using daily journals, boxes of letters, and hours of conversation. Unfortunately, Hannah’s sections don’t have the same impact or sense of verity as Burrowes’s. Still, the narrative remains gripping and immersive, and it successfully recounts a mother trying to understand her daughter’s struggle and her own role in the recovery process.