The Place Between Breaths

Starred review from January 8, 2018
Na (The Fold) creates a powerful impression of life with schizophrenia in this psychologically intense novel. Grace King’s father is determined to help find a cure for the mental disorder that plagued his wife and caused her to disappear when Grace was a child. A former doctor, he has taken an administrative position at the Genentium clinic where Grace has secured a prestigious internship. Although the clinic is filled with brilliant, dedicated doctors, Grace doesn’t share her father’s optimism that a cure for schizophrenia will be found. Then her own sense of reality begins to deteriorate; she becomes increasingly disoriented and preoccupied with images and sounds, including the nightmarish clamor of an approaching train. The disjointed structure of the novel—jumping from one reality to another, and moving among first-, second-, and third-person perspectives—effectively reflects the state of Grace’s mind, in which time is not linear but rather an incomplete mosaic of events past, present, and imagined. Readers will feel Grace’s tension viscerally, as she weighs hope against despair. Ages 12–up. Agent: Holly McGhee, Pippin Properties.

February 1, 2018
Walking away from those we love most may seem like the kindest thing we can do, but it's a choice that will forever haunt those we leave behind.Where do we place our faith--in God, in other people, in science? Grace and her father believe salvation will come in the form of a cure for the schizophrenia that led her mother to abandon her family and which now threatens Grace as well. To this end, her workaholic father, a racially ambiguous adoptee who met her Korean mother while working as an Army doctor, is a recruiter for a laboratory doing genetic research, luring in the best talent he can find. Still in high school, 18-year-old Grace has an internship at the same lab, where she meets one of her father's hires, blue-eyed Will, whose easy manner and caring personality draw her in. But all is not well for Grace at home, at school, or in the dark recesses of her mind, where grief, fear, memory, and dread mingle. Told obliquely, with frequent shifts in time marked by seasons in the chapter headers, the spare, haunting text demands and rewards readers' careful attention as they struggle, along with Grace, to determine what is actually real.Thoughtful readers who appreciate literary fiction will find much to savor in this lyrical novel suffused with beauty and terror. (Fiction. 12-adult)

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March 1, 2018

Gr 9 Up-Grace King is a resilient and talented high school senior, who has had to raise herself since her mother, who has schizophrenia, left the family when Grace was five. Grace's father, a doctor turned researcher and recruiter, has obsessively devoted his life to finding his wife and advancing the treatment of the disease. More than a decade later, he is sure that he has lured the best geneticists in the field to work at a lab outside of Chicago and that they are about to make a significant breakthrough. Grace, who has won a coveted internship at the lab, has long since given up on romantic notions of her mother's return or the belief in a miracle cure. She is a hard-core realist and a scientist through and through, until she starts to exhibit many of the symptoms that took her mother away from her and is forced to reexamine everything she thought she knew about faith and religion, science, and, most of all, hope. Steeped in lyricism and metaphor, Na's devastating story explores the workings of the human mind, the melancholy sweetness of memory, and the power of dreams. The narrative is revealed in nonlinear seasonal chapters told in different voices, which reinforce the protagonist's sense of dislocation and disorientation. VERDICT A slim but demanding and haunting novel for readers of Beth Kephart's One Stolen Thing or John Green's Turtles All the Way Down.-Luann Toth, School Library Journal

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2018
On the surface, high school senior Grace appears smart and strong. She has a coveted internship at a prestigious genetics lab, where her team has discovered a gene that may hold the secret to curing schizophrenia (and where her dad is a high-level administrator, obsessed with finding that cure). But on the inside, Grace is slowly splintering. Even as she works toward a remedy, she is desperately trying to hide symptoms of the same schizophrenia that caused her mother to abandon the family when Grace was a child. As Grace struggles to mask her disorientation, disturbing memories of her mother surface, and she wonders whether she can wait for a cure or end her own life before losing herself to the illness. A shrieking train whistle and references to Frog and Toad are revelatory motifs that help readers discern who and what is real in Grace's world, where the past and present seem to coexist uneasily. Told in a cycle of voices corresponding to the four seasons (Grace's dad is winter, Grace in the present is spring, Grace's mother is summer, and younger Grace is autumn) and moving back and forth among the first, second, and third person, Printz Award-winner (A Step from Heaven, rev. 7/01) An Na's first book in a decade is a harrowing, intricately plotted examination of the toll mental illness can take on a family. jennifer hubert swan

(Copyright 2018 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)