Julian Meynell's Books

A good book, although it did not really suck me in. For me, the way the patients in the hospital were drawn, caused me to not end up empathizing with them as much as I might. It's nothing against the book really, a different person might empathize with them more. I was not really that attracted to the main character, and that was a block for me.

The things that it is saying about the psychiatric profession are important, however. The power imbalance is as extreme as it is between kindergarteners and their teachers, but these are adults and there is always a significant chance of abusive and harmful behavior, so that the treatment can become the primary problem and not the original illness. So the message is important and the book is clever. The writing style is fine, but in the end I didn't get that into the prose.

I think part of the problem is that a book about treatment for psychiatric patients needs also to be about why they are psychiatric patients, so that something like The Bell Jar works better, because it is also about that.