Overview
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
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
This book title, H, ISBN: 9780140243895, by Elizabeth Shepard, published by Penguin Publishing Group (June 1, 1996) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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