"I feel like a rain cloud."
Parent mental health in fiction for young people, my 2025 WA book tour, and some recent articles about children's (and adult) literature that are worth your time.
The depression belongs to all of us
While working at the bookshop this week, I read Saturday is Pancake Day by Bernadette Green and Daniel Gray-Barnett. I first saw it on the shelf months ago, and originally thought it was a straighforward take on a fun family tradition. However, as with many great picture books, there are deeper layers to the story.
I soon realised that Saturday is Pancake Day gently explores parent mental health. It’s subtle, and could be easily missed by some readers, but is also admirable and purposeful, and genuinely hit me with a jolt.
How many other children’s books like this are there?
In my final years of high school, I read Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta, which was perhaps the first time I’d ever been faced with any consideration of mental health, and not just in literature. Despression or anxiety weren’t topics that were openly discussed in the early 00s, let alone taught in schools. I’ve always believed that fiction is a great way for young people to be introduced to heavy topics in a safe and supportive manner, especially when scaffolded by reassuring conversations with parents, guardians or educators.
Even if we didn’t have those kinds of discussions about mental health when I was growing up, Saving Francesca was enough to get me thinking about a few things I hadn’t before: the nature of depression, the inner lives of our parents and other adults, and what it means to harbour family secrets. Looking back, I can see the value of reading something like that. I wouldn’t have had the words for it then, and my own life certainly wasn’t a mirror of the book, but it still made me feel less alone somehow.
The depression belongs to all of us. I think of the family down the road whose mother was having a baby and they went around the neighborhood saying, "We're pregnant." I want to go around the neighborhood saying, "We're depressed." If my mum can't get out of bed in the morning, all of us feel the same. Her silence has become ours, and it's eating us alive.
I haven’t re-read Saving Francesca in many years so I’m not sure how it holds up, but I know it can still be found in school libraries, and even on booklists, so it has definitely had some staying power, nearly twenty years on from its publication.
Teenage me never fully understood all the fuss over Looking for Alibrandi, when Saving Francesca spoke to me so much more. I’ll have to revisit it and see if it still does.
On reflection, there are other books from that era that touch on similar themes, although they possibly haven’t aged that well in some regards. About a Boy by Nick Hornby (an adult novel, of course, but with coming-of-age themes appealing to a teen audience) and The Illustrated Mum by Jacqueline Wilson are two that I can think of. I remember both having quite demonising (and possibly unfair?) approaches to parent mental health. Although I am a big fan of both authors, the mentally ill characters in those books do tend to lean towards stereotypes.
We’ve come a long way since then in the general rhetoric, but I can’t think of many great recent examples in children’s literature, if I’m honest. One of the characters in The Yearbook Committee by Sarah Ayoub is single-handedly taking care of his mother after a breakdown, and in Mosquitoland by David Arnold the main character experiences the impact of family mental illness.
Perhaps the most successful one I can think of, The Elephant by Peter Carnavas, tells the story of Olive and her father, who has a sadness so big that she imagines it as a large grey elephant following him around. It’s age-appropriate, carefully handled, and far from didactic. When writing about such a topic for children, I believe it is the responsibility of authors and publishers to not vilify nor romantisce mental illness or grief, and to be realistic but also delicate around the darkness.
Her father … looked at her with raincloud eyes.
Almost half of all Australians adults face mental ill-health at some point in their lives. As a school librarian, this is something that will (and has) come up with my students, and it is my job to be equipped to offer suggestions for books that can help them broach the topic. And as a parent, this is something that I will definitely want to talk with my child about. As always, fiction is a great place to turn.
There are many great contemporary novels, both internationally and within Australia, that explore teen (and tween) mental health in a way that avoids cliches and faces the issues head on (one of my favourites in recent years is How it Feels to Float by Helena Fox) but there are far less, at least that I can think of, that address parent mental health.
Are there any other children’s books about parent mental health that you can think of? Hopefully I’m missing some good ones! I’d love to hear from you. Please comment below.
WA Book Tour 2025
I’m heading out west! I grew up in country WA, and am excited to spend two weeks there next year, visiting schools and libraries to promote my new book, The Paperbark Tree Committee, and also reflect on my debut novel, All the Little Tricky Things.
I am happy to chat about how my experience growing up in WA influences my writing, my creative process, and my journey from librarian to author. Or anything else! This could be a presentation or creative writing workshop, and I can adjust it to suit smaller groups or whole cohorts.
Please get in touch if you’d like me to visit your school or library!
Reading about reading
A couple of thought-provoking online articles I’ve come across recently:
This article in the New Yorker about Katherine Rundell, a brilliant children’s author from the UK.
It may be true that adults should read children’s books, but it is definitely true that children’s books should not be written for adults, and Rundell knows her audience; she neither talks down to kids nor shies away from the things that interest them while leaving grownups cold.
Whether you’re familiar with Katherine Rundell’s books or not, there is plenty of food for thought in this piece when it comes to children’s literature and the purpose it serves in young lives.
The catchphrase of contemporary children’s literature is “windows and mirrors,” the idea being that books for young people should either give them insight into other people’s lives or reflect their own experiences. Rundell honors the admirable intentions behind this theory; her heroes include a disabled girl, a ballet-loving boy, and an aspiring Black acrobat, and she creates worlds in which, wonderfully, young men look up to young women. (“It would have been quite something, to have had a sister,” Christopher thinks, while marvelling at Mal.) But she also understands the limitations of the windows-and-mirrors credo. Representation is not the same as identification, and children are perfectly capable of seeing their real troubles in improbable tales, and of seeing themselves in a dragon.
If you haven’t read any of her books, I highly recommend her latest, of which the article reviews in depth, or else any of her others. You really can’t go wrong. She’s a wonder.
This opinion article in the New York Times, written by a parent who bribed her daughter with $100 to read a book. Before you pass any judgement, read it. I was dubious at first, and then after reading the last line—
I also know that together, we finally opened a new portal for her to the printed page: a quiet personal place that I imagine — I hope — will serve her for a lifetime. That feels like the best money I ever spent.
—I have to admit I’ve been somewhat swayed. Not necessarily on paying your children to read, as such ($100 seems like a lot…), but at the very least, doing whatever it takes to open that portal. Sometimes you can find the right book for the right kid at the right time, but you still have to convince that kid to actually open the book and start reading. I don’t begrudge parents or educators for trying something last-ditch in times of desperation, including a touch of bribery. As the author says, “I can’t say I am proud — but I am extremely satisfied.” I have to give her kudos for her honesty.
(Although as a final note, I will add that in the article, the book the author gave her child seemed like the perfect thing for them, and I have to wonder if they would have just gone for it based on the solid recommendation alone! But again, I really do have some empathy for the concept of: whatever it takes!)
This Substack post about what I think may be the most underrated young adult book of all time??? Why isn’t this book everywhere??? I honestly think you should all get a copy of this French, feminist, contemporary novel for teenagers, and read it. Immediately.
I was ecstatic to be reminded of it, and see it get the praise it so urgently deserves, even quite a few years on from its publication in 2017. I came across Piglettes while working in my first school library, and forcefully shoved it into the hands of every student who would take it, with the solemn promise that it would make them laugh until they cried. I stand by that guarantee to this day.
This article about the new Jacqueline Wilson book for adults. I am also reading the actual book itself with feverish delight, as a very longtime fan of the Girls series. IYKYK.
When it was announced earlier this year that Jacqueline Wilson had written her first book for adults, the ruckus of thousands of millennial women could have registered on the Richter scale.
Yes, I am proudly one of those millenial women who audibly cheered when I heard the news. And so far the book is living up to my expectations and hopes and dreams, and then some. Ellie is the terrific mess I always imagined she would be at 40.
And finally, this article from a few months back. This is another one that is about adult books, but has made me reflect on how it applies in young adult fiction, too. It has has very clickbait-y title, and I don’t necessarily agree with all of the authors’ thoughts, but they definitely pose a lot of questions worth thinking about—whether you’re on board with the claims, or not.
As a woman, I’m finding myself keen to read more novels from a young male perspective, especially if they’re exploring stories of diaspora or touching on vulnerabilities in new and exciting ways. There’s an appetite for these stories for sure, and the question now is about finding those voices. In a world that feels progressively more fractured and uncertain, are more young men turning to fiction to meet themselves on the page? Is this, in turn, fueling this appetite for more young-men-coming-of-age stories? Like any literature, the cultural value is to generate empathy and to create a space of understanding between reader and writer.
When I judged the CBCA Book of the Year Awards in 2020-2021, there was a real plethora of sad boy lit, plenty of it excellent, but with little diversity within the trend itself. It would be great to see it expand, and I think that has begun to happen for sure in Australian young adult fiction, albeit pretty slowly.
Gone are the days when only certain voices were front and center; now the new canon of male writers includes voices that are queer, Black, trans, and beyond. As I consider what literary masculinity might mean today, I’m struck by something Hansbury said to me: “If masculinity is threatened, hopefully it’s the old masculinity of extraction, violence, and domination.” I couldn’t agree more.
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