From School Library Journal
Grade 10 Up—Kit, 17, is a troubled youth who is being led astray by his friend Ike. Just the previous year, he had a circle of friends, a wonderful girlfriend, and a place on the basketball team. Now he hangs out more and more with Ike, coerced into thinking that he should hike to the top of a mountain in Strathcona Park, British Columbia, and bury himself in the snow in order to preserve his body, to be found hundreds if not thousands of years in the future. At times, Kit seems to resent the fact that Ike will not be sacrificing himself while he is encouraging Kit to commit suicide. In the meantime, Kit's parents know something is wrong, but just don't know what has happened to their once easygoing, affable son. Readers will eventually recognize that Ike is not real, but a hallucination caused by the onset of schizophrenia. While the story is about a young man with a mental illness, it is also a well-told, readable mystery, brimming with suspense. An author's note giving details about schizophrenia adds an additional level of clarity to the novel's ending.—
Wendy Smith-D'Arezzo, Loyola College, Baltimore, MD Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
With clinical exactitude, Denman takes a Vancouver teenager through progressively severe symptoms of schizophrenia. Egged on by a verbally abusive (and, as it turns out, imaginary) companion, Kit maps for himself an elaborate suicide—all while blanking out at school and at home, meeting the concern of friends and family with ever sharper hostility, composing increasingly incoherent essays about modern society for supposed future readers, and suffering from delusions of persecution. The author closes her tale with Kit in a hospital bed after a dramatic last-minute rescue, but readers who are over needing their endings to be simple and happy would do well not to skip her afterword, in which she explains that this sort of mental illness is not entirely curable, or better yet follow up with Terry Trueman’s Inside Out (2003), which picks up on a similar case where this one leaves off. Grades 7-10. --John Peters
