Reviews: (by author)

Brown, Susan Taylor. Hugging the Rock. Berkley: Tricycle Press, 2006. ISBN 978-1-58246-180-9. $14.95. Ages 9-12. 169 pp.

When her mother runs away without explanation, Rachel is left with a father she barely knows. Not knowing how to cope, she retreats into herself and lets her schoolwork and relationship with her best friend fall apart. Like many children whose parents’ split up, she blames the parent who remains with her, and she blames herself. As both Rachel and her father struggle to adapt to life without her mother, Rachel learns the truth about her mother’s illness, and begins to love and lean on her father, the rock.

In this debut novel, Susan Taylor Brown not only addresses the issue of parental separation, she brings up the issue of mental illness through the bipolar mother. In following Rachel’s process of learning about why her mother left, and her father’s efforts to be a good parent, Brown shows her readers that sometimes parents do not have all the answers and that children and parents need each other to find strength in hard times.

Brown’s decision to write the book in verse really helps to give insight into Rachel’s anguish and confusion. The poetic tone of the book reads like a journal into Rachel’s private thoughts.

The way Brown weaves the image of the father as a rock is also powerful, as Rachel changes her definition of what it means to be a rock from being negative to positive.

Joyce Ho, June 2007

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