Kirkus Review

A debut memoir recounts a mother's struggle with her young daughter's mental illness. Rehkamp, a boutique owner and mental health advocate, devotes her book to the story of her daughter's difficulties with anxiety attacks and how the child's mental illness affected her whole family. The volume includes an interview with the daughter, a mother's notes and letters to her child ("It is not about 'getting better.' It is about getting 'stronger'"), and a detailed journal account of the girl's treatment and progress. The last provides a bit too much detail and seems like a violation of the Rehkamps' privacy, even in the name of educating readers. Otherwise, the author presents readers with a very human and humanizing account of living with a child's mental illness and learning how to manage it, especially in regard to anxiety attacks' triggers. There's also a thread running through the memoir about the daughter staying in or taking leave from the dance competitions that were so much a part of her life. Rehkamp focus on resilience occasionally comes off as too glib, but she avoids being Pollyannaish in recognizing that there is sometimes no choice but to push forward toward healing. Part of the point of this book is to destigmatize mental illness and to enable those who live with it as well as their loved ones to be able to talk about it. And the author makes an especially good point regarding where the stigma and shame really come from--less from the condition itself and more as a result of concern over what people will think. Underscoring this goal, Rehkamp mentions that as her daughter started to recover, the author took on her own advocacy role. And throughout, Rehkamp wisely avoids the parental tendency in this kind of situation to reduce her child to her condition by way of trying to "fix" things. This is an engrossing memoir on a subject that is still difficult to write about. A candid, hopeful, and compelling account of a mother dealing with a child's mental illness. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.