by Erica Frank

Deborah Blau lives in two worlds. One is the world of post-World War II America, where she faces anti-Semitism at school, and her family is fraught with guilt from relying on her grandfather's wealth instead of her father's limited wages. The other is the Kingdom of Yr: a world with vast open plains and the endless chasm of The Pit. Yr's residents include Anterrabae, the Falling God; Lactamaeon, second in command; and Idat the Dissembler, who is neither male nor female. "You are not of them," the Yri gods tell her, and they teach her to soar the skies in her eagle-self, and she sings with them in the secret language of the hidden realm. The Censor stands guard to prevent the words from mingling when she shifts between the Rising Calendar of Yr and the Heavy Calendar of Earth.

But I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is not a science fiction novel, and Deborah is neither a time-traveler nor a sorceress. She is a sixteen-year-old girl, and Yr is the delusional world of her mental illness.

Yr is a compelling world; Yri is an intriguing language. We only see them in glimpses as Deborah struggles to explain her truths to Doctor Fried, whom she names Furii, Fire-Touch, in her secret language. Yr is Deborah's protection and way of explaining to herself the traumas of her life: the tumor removed when she was five, the racist girls at her summer camp, the endless tensions between her parents and grandfather. She is surrounded by lies, and Yr is the place where nobody lies to her.

Nobody in Yr tells her, "This will not hurt at all, and when you wake up, you will be all better." Nobody tells her, "None of these girls called you a stinking Jew." Nobody says, "You are smart and special and that means you will be successful in life." In Yr, the customary greeting is "suffer, victim," and the calendar rises in good times and falls in bad times, and Deborah flies as a bird or gallops as a horse, unfettered and free. The incantation that calls forth her freedom is beautiful:

“e, quio quio quaru ar Yr aedat
temoluqu' braown elepr kyryr…”
(Brushwinged, I soar above the canyons of your sleep singing…)

Of course she wants to stay there. Yr has been her solace and sanctuary since she was six years old; it will be very, very hard for her to acknowledge it might not be a real place. If she loses it, she believes life will be nothing but falsehoods and distortions and incomprehensible tasks assigned by others.

But Yr is turning dark. The Collect, the swarm of voices who shout instructions and insults at her, are growing louder, and she spends less time celebrating its beauty and more in regions of fear and pain. The gods who were delightful companions at first, distracting her from real-world tensions and abuses, now bring her messages of bitterness and horror. Even so, Deborah retreats into Yr more and more, losing entire days from memory and not knowing what she did or said in that time.

Deborah is committed to a mental institution, and it begins as a great relief to her. For the first time in years, nobody is pretending she is normal, that there is nothing wrong with her. Of course, what Deborah thinks is wrong with her, and what the doctors think is wrong with her, don't match–but fixing that can come later. First, she has to trust that they can recognize that she has real problems.

Deborah's doctor is much in demand; she wouldn't take the case if she didn't believe Deborah could get better. Dr. Fried is acclaimed, even famous, and she needs that cachet of status when convincing the parents to leave her there, especially after Deborah is committed to the "Disturbed" ward, with bars on the windows and ratty-haired women wearing pajamas all day. Her parents are dismayed at the idea of their "sensitive" little girl being in such a place, and they worry about the community finding out about her illness. The doctor needs to persuade them, and keep persuading them, that Deborah needs this.

And she does. She has to get worse before she can get better. She has to let go of the constraints of blending in, of being polite, of pretending that social interactions mean the same things to her that they do to others.

Deborah's journey is a hard battle, and a big part of it is how she relates to the other inmates. At first, they are all mysteries to her, just another set of talking obstacles she navigates around while she tries to sort out truth from fantasy. Slowly, she comes to realize that each of them has her own traumas, her own methods of coping, and to recognize the potential of future health in some of them–a terrifying thought for people who find hope a burden as much as a source of strength.

She learns the secret codes they use to sneak forbidden items past the nurses. She makes a friend, when she was never able to do so at school. She seeks out those who can teach her Latin and Greek, in fragments and amidst the fights that explode any time something changes in the ward. (Just hearing about someone who used to be here, but is now working in the real world, is enough strain to disrupt the place for days.) She learns that the staff thinks of her as cold and vicious, and that her intellect is weapon as much as tool. And she learns compassion, the baffling wonder of having the power to help someone else, when she had been convinced that her very essence was nothing but poison.

While the story is set in the late 40s and early 50s, it's timeless. The town and the institute are never named, nor do they need to be. While today's mental institutions won't have a regular influx of conscientious objectors serving as orderlies to avoid prison, there are always some staff who obviously don't want to be there. The patients recognize the ones who fear and hate them, and treat them differently. Some of the security practices seem almost barbaric, but Deborah shrugs them off; her trials are internal, and physical comforts are irrelevant to her.

Rose Garden is intense and fascinating. It gives a glimpse into both mental illness and how the stigma surrounding it can make it worse: Deborah's troubles are harder for having to pretend she is "normal." The world of Yr would make a delightful setting for a novel in its own right, and it is hard, as a science fiction fan, to favor the termination of such a place–but that is what Deborah needs, so that is what the reader comes to want as well.

5 stars; it doesn't get better than this.

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