The Law of Loving Others by Kate Axelrod (review)

Seventeen-year-old Emma goes home from boarding school for Christmas break to find her mother in the midst of a paranoid frenzy severe enough to require hospitalization. The revelation of her mother’s schizophrenia rocks Emma’s world and sends her skittering through a bewildering mix of emotions and questions: how could she not have known? Will she, too, suffer a psychotic break? Are her panic attacks a precursor? Her disorientation sends her into the arms of a boy she meets at a friend’s house, who happens to have a brother at the same facility as her mother; his empathy is more satisfying than her boyfriend’s, and the two end up sleeping together, which adds guilt to her stew of emotions. While Emma’s path through this difficult time is littered with credibly impulsive and narcissistic decisions, her reflections on her motivations are much more insightful than the acts themselves; instead of a high school junior, she reads like a twentysomething who’s had a lot of therapy. The posh boarding school and urbane atmosphere in some ways account for her attitudes toward casual drug use and open sexuality, but her naïveté about her mother’s breakdown is at odds with the close relationship between Emma and her mother that the book tries to establish retrospectively. The maturity of her reflections does provide helpful context for readers, however, so while Emma as a character is ultimately hard to believe in, the situation and vagaries of coping with a parent with a serious mental illness are well handled.