I just sent Fall Girl to my Kindle and am looking forward to checking it out tonight. Author Marybeth Smith is an advocate for bipolar disorder and addresses this complex issue in her writing.
Annabelle Jones has always taken her bipolar brother under her wing, but after years of acting as his personal disaster janitor she finds herself rebelling against her lifelong compulsion to take responsibility for his actions and fix all his mistakes. Unfortunately, the more she rebels the more personal it becomes, especially when his actions start to affect her own future.
The struggle between letting her brother deal with his own consequences and fixing just one more thing for him pushes and pulls at Annabelle as each mistake he makes lands her further and further from the life she's always known and crushes all hopes of the future she has planned. If the decision she makes about whether or not to play clean up crew for his most recent disaster fails to produce the results she needs most, life as she knows it will be forever changed. But maybe ... just maybe, letting him take the fall for his screw ups this time might turn out to be the best thing that's ever happened to her.
Whereas books like The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath or Impulse, by Ellen Hopkins show mental disorders through the viewpoint of the individual suffering from the illness, Fall Girl explores Bipolar through the eyes of a family member in order to show that bipolar disorder not only affects the person suffering from the illness, but also the people who are close to them.
