A Tragic Kind of Wonderful by Eric Lindstrom (review)

Since her brother’s death and her own onset of bipolar disorder, sixteen-year-old Mel Hannigan has walked away from her best friends rather than telling them about her condition. The only place she feels safe to be herself is at the nursing home where she works. A retired psychiatrist there is a trusted confidante who has helped her understand her cycling through various mental states as a mix of forces that she has named for animals—a hamster for her head and the clarity of her thinking, a hummingbird for her heart rate and energy level, a hammerhead shark for her physical health, and a host self called Hanniganimal that reflects her composite mood state. Chapters set in the present begin with an assessment of these four components, and Mel’s language and sentence structure change as her moods deteriorate. She has also met a new boy, who wants to understand and help but doesn’t know how to draw the lines between keeping her safe and trusting her to manage her own mental health. Woven into the narrative are many aspects of the disorder, including its hereditary nature, displayed by her grandmother, her aunt, and her brother; the dysphoric mania and risk taking that affect both her and her brother, resulting in his death; and the sexual energy that confuses Mel as her onset is accompanied by previously unrecognized bisexual desires. These clinical details surface naturally through an engaging and fast-moving plot that foregrounds Mel as a person who maintains a strong ethic of kindness even and especially when her Hanniganimal is down, making her a bipolar poster child fully worthy of reader sympathy.