Customer Reviews

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

5 star:		(77)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

~ ~ ~One thing I've noticed is that most people who have read this book had it recommended to them as an adolescent. If you didn't-read it now!
This book is fascinating and extremely well written. Adults will probably have the perspective to enjoy it even more than adolescents do. I first read this book when I was 11,and I didn't quite understand it all, but it was still absorbing and fascinating. I reread it many times over the years, each reading feeling more swept away by Deborah's story. Now I'm 43 years old, an M.D., and I still love this book.
~ ~ ~
The story of Deborah, a 16-year-old schizophrenic young Jewish girl, is told with amazing insight into the delusions and hallucinations of this type of mental illness. At the same time the "unreality" Deborah experiences is described so creatively, and evocatively, and is so rich and textured, that it is very easy to find yourself falling into "her" vision of the world. This is especially true when her rich fantasies are contrasted with the cold, impersonal and randomly cruel life of the hospital (unfortunately I believe this is a very accurate description of even what was a "good" psychiatric hospital in the 1950's).
-- Deborah's progress closer to "sanity" contains moments of clarity and connection so beautifully described, they can still bring me close to tears.
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If I could recommend only one book in the whole of Amazon.com: this would be the one!

I read and loved this book as an adolescent. I recently saw it at the library and decided to take it out and read it again. I just finished re-reading it and found it as powerful as I remembered, possibly even more so.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden presents a complete picture of mental illness from the patient's point of view, without the stigma of wrongness that is frequently associated with it. The picture painted is a very real one, from Deborah's relief when the doctors confirm what she's known all along, that something is not right, to the way her family deals with the fact of her illness. Greenberg/Green evokes very strong emotions with her writing. You feel Deborah's fear that her secret world of Yr will punish her for revealing its existence to her doctor, and you share in her triumph when she begins to make her way back to the world. I put down this book with a little more understanding of how it must feel to be mentally ill. I would recommend it to anyone, teen or adult.

I always loved this book when I was a teenager - I must have read it at least 4-5 times (actually, I'm an avid reader, so that isn't really that unusual). However, I have just re-read the book at 30, after 5 years of treatment for my own mental disorders, and have seen so much in the book that I never saw before. Perhaps this book appealed to me so much as an unkowingly sick teen because I could relate to Deborah Blau, although her disorder is of an entirely different type and scale from mine.

I must say that this book should be required reading for anyone dealing with a loved-one's journey towards mental health. One thing people without these problems can't understand is that it is easier to stay sick - that getting healthy is hard work, scary, and LONG! And along the way, the symptoms may get worse, while you're actually getting better. This book is the first time I've seen someone try to explain this phenomenom - that the mentally ill cling to their symptoms as to a life-line, using them as protection while they heal, until the reach the point where those symptoms are no longer needed.

After re-reading this book, I understand my own treatment so much better, and will recommend it to my loved-ones who have to deal with my treatment - maybe they can get a glimmer of understanding. It is rare in this world for any "healthy" person to truly understand mental illness

One thing I've noticed is that most people who've read this book, read it first as an adolescent. If you didn't-read it now! This book is fascinating and extremely well written. Adullts will probably have the perspective to enjoy it even more than adolescents do. I first read this book when I was 11,and I didn't quite understand it all, but it caught me up, and I reread it many times over the years, each reading feeling more swept away by by Deborah's story. Now I'm 43 years old, an M.D., and I still love this book. The story of Deborah, a 16 y.o. schizophrenic young jewish girl, is told with amazing insight into the delusions and hallucinations of this type of mental illness. At the same time the "unreality" Deborah experiences is described so creatively, and evocatively, and is so rich and textured, that it is very easy to find yourself falling into "her" vision of the world. This is especially true when her rich fantasies are contrasted with the cold, impersonal and randomly cruel life of the hospital(unfortunately I believe this is a very accurate description of even what was a "good" pyschiatric hospital in the 1950's).
Deborah's progress closer to "sanity" contains moments of clarity and connection so beautifully described, they can still bring me close to tears. If I could recommend only one book in the whole of Amazon.com: this would be the one!

Living in two separate worlds is an idea that seems to only be portrayed in science fiction or fantasy novels. However, for Deborah Blau, this concept is part of her reality. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden reveals the story of Deborah, an adolescent diagnosed with schizophrenia who comes from a background of mixed feelings within her immediate family, an overpowering grandfather that holds expectations for her that seem almost out of reach, and anti-Semitic discrimination from her peers. Instead of a lengthy exposition, the plot begins with Deborah's parents finally making the decision to remove her from high school and send her to a mental institution for intense psychological treatment.

The reader learns about Deborah's dark history and the deep processes of her mind through her thoughts and consultations with her therapist, Dr. Fried. Since setting is primarily in the different wards of the mental facility, leaving little room for any major plot development outside of Deborah's successes and failures while receiving treatment, the character development is paramount in this novel. The author, Joanne Greenberg, does a superb job of depicting dysfunctional characters that not only serve the purpose of comic relief because of their erratic behavior, but also reveal deeper, more melancholic aspects of the life of a mentally ill individual.

Greenberg juxtaposes the horror of mental illness with the relative safety it provides for the affected from facing the challenges of the real world. This is the core of Deborah's conflict within her mind. She must decide between her imaginary place, Yr, that offers safety yet keeps her locked away from the world, or she must face her fears and experience life with both its challenges and opportunities. The friendships that she makes in the institution highlight the novel's stress on the importance of building relationships for personal growth and allow her to accept the fact that most people have problems and possess the ability to work through them.

Dr. Fried is the epitome of a knowledgeable, patient, and committed therapist that is dedicated to helping Deborah release herself from the depths of Yr and to bringing her back to a relatively normal life. Though the novel is focused on Deborah's life in the mental facility, there are several parts that allow the reader to experience, through heartfelt descriptions, the effect that her institutionalization has on her family. Her parents learn to accept and ward off judgments from others that stem from Deborah's "label" of being mentally unstable. Despite their problems, the Blau family members are readily supportive of Deborah and hope for a successful recovery.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is an absolutely fascinating book because it provides clear insight into the complicated lives of the mentally ill and stresses that people should neither fear nor revere these individuals due to their altered state of consciousness. Rather, society should endeavor to view them and their issues in an unbiased manner, for there is not a person living without some type of challenge that he or she must face.

Young adult reading about a mentally ill 16-year-old girl who endures 3 years in a mental hospital. The story is told mostly from Deborah Blau's, the 16-year-old girl, point of view.

Deborah's mental illness established early in her life due to pent up rage, frustration, and the pain of not being accepted in life, among other things. Because of this rejection by the world, she created in her mind Yr, a fantasy land where she could escape the harsh realities of life, but Yr slowly turned into a place none-too-nice that held her captive in her mind.

I loved this book for the simple fact that we're allowed to see things from Deborah's point of view. Few books do that. Usually, we're presented with a view from someone who's sane, thus sealing the prejudices and pity associated with the mentally ill. People tend to forget that the patients are still human, preferring to ostracize them because of their state-of-mind. This story presents the patients at people, and they are surprisingly astute and introspective despite their illness, and they are aware of what people who don't have an illness thinks of them.

Deborah's story is a fascinating one. She works with a gifted psychiatrist to overcome Yr and its gods, which hurts her when she tries to tell the secrets of their world. We follow her sickness, her stages of recovery, and her eventual reintroduction to the world. It was nice to read a book that wasn't a horror that presented a view of mental illness. My lack to rate it higher comes from the fact that parts of the book were lacking in my opinion, but that doesn't void out the fact that book was a good read.

I first read this book about 30 years ago and loved it then. For a long time I made a point to read this novel again at least once per year, but have not done so for a while. I recently re-read it again and was once again struck by the poignancy and richness of the story. A young girl, Deb, is diagnosed as having schizophrenia, an illness where she lives in her own mental world complete with its own beauty, language, friendship--and punishment. Deb's struggle to become "normal" again leaves us cheering for her as she struggles with the "beings" in this make-believe world--and the other remarkable real life mental patients she encounters along the way. The devastation of mental illness, particularly schizophrenia, is realisticly and sympathetically portrayed in this book. You will never forget Deb, her doctor, or fellow patients. This is one of the absolute best books I have ever read--again and again.

I really enjoyed this book, although it wrongly displayed schizophrenia. Deborah is admitted into a mental hospital for schizophrenia. She goes into another world she calls Yr where she is frequently punished because she can do no right in Yr. She has her own name in Yr and a whole other language in her world. She is completely detached from everyone else. Deborah has family problems and we learn about her past and more about her mother and father. Deborah needs to find her own cure, which the hospital helps her start by setting her with a wonderful psychologist.The book has a deep plot and can be a little hard to follow at times, but the small struggles are worth it.

Madness and insanity. Having voices in your head and being kept in a mental hospital because you have to be. This book, I Never Promised you a Rose Garden, by Joanne Greenberg, is an emotional book that makes the reader feel as if he or she were right in the story. I think this was a good book because of how the book was realistic and informative. Personally, I liked books that relate to real life situations. This book does a good job of demonstrating life in a mental hospital. Fights, breakdowns, and feeling are all happenings that really occur in hospitals like this one. In this book, Deborah has to overcome seeing unhappiness and the sickness of others. People around her go into another state of mind and are acting in a different way all of the time. Due to the changes in personalities, people begin to fight with each other and hate each other. Deborah has to witness everyone's emotions coming out, while having to try and deal with her own. Another reason I thought the book was good, is it was unpredictable. Deborah was always facing a new challenge. At one point, she would think she was recovering. Then, voices would come back to her. The voices were supposedly from a place in her mind from another world. Yri words were what they were referred to as. This voice would act kind of like her conscience. She would never know what they would have to say. At one point, they might tell her to do the right action, and at other times, the voices would tell her to go and do something wrong. An example is when she got into a fight with her friend and pushed her. She was not going to however, the voice in her head told her to. Another unpredictable happening was when Deborah told the doctor about these voices. That was something that I did not think would be said. I figured she would keep that to herself. One more action I thought would not happen was Deborah having to spend three years in this hospital to recover. I thought it would take less time. As much as I liked this book, I'd have to say that the one down fall, is for this book, focusing was much needed. For me at least, I had to really concentrate on what was going on. By reading this book sporadically, only once and a while, keeping tract of everything may be difficult. When I left off and then went back, I had to think about all of the occurrences previous for the rest to make sense. This book is the type that flows and is good to just sit and read through at once. In some books, each chapter is sort of a break in the story. This book was not like that. I think the book would be the same, even if the book had no chapters and was all one long story. Overall, I would have to say that this was a pretty decent book. I think the book could have been better it had separate parts and was not all one story. Endings of chapters I feel should be something that will make the reader wonder. In this book, that was not the case. The book was informative and gave a good idea of how life is for people who have mental conditions. Also, the book was good because nothing unbelievable or far-fetched was mentioned. In some books something is read that makes the reader say, "yeah right". This book was also very serious and emotional. I say emotional because I felt bad for the patients. Even though I know this particular book is fiction, this situation is happening in real life. So in conclusion, I'd recommend this book for other people to read, especially for those who know someone in a mental hospital.

Autobiographical & haunting. I've read this more times than I can count; my copy is dog-eared & well-loved. The psychiatric treatment is outdated, but the beauty of the story & the language used to tell it overwhelm uneasiness about how Deborah's condition is handled. The ending of this book makes me cry every time - sad tears for what Deborah gives up. Recommended without reservation.