H

Recommended reading by the National Mental Health Association. <p/> 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. <p/> 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. <i>H</i> is an astute sympathetic evocation of the state we persist in calling madness. <p/> 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.--<i>The Boston Globe</i><br> <i> </i><br> Shepard is a reverse archaeologist designing a tiny contemporary lost world for readers to excavate. . . . Everything matters. . . Shepard gets everything right.--<i>New York</i> magazine