Me, Myself and Ike

October 12, 2009
Denman (Perfect Revenge
) offers a stark and fascinating portrait of a paranoid and delusional teenager. High school student Kit (a formerly popular kid who now sees his friends slipping away) and his friend Ike are obsessed with Ötzi the Iceman (a mummy discovered in the Alps in 1991) and fascinated by the insight into prehistoric man that his frozen body provided. They hatch a plan to gather artifacts of interest to future generations and freeze to death with them on a mountain, ensuring their eternal fame (“All those actors and rock stars—who's going to even know their names?” Ike says. “But a guy who's, like, a messenger from the past, that's special. Extraordinary”). As Kit gathers artifacts and deflects questions from friends and family, he writes a “manifesto” about modern culture and hangs out with the increasingly abusive Ike. Denman deftly gets into the head of a mentally unwell teenager while telling a coherent, engaging story. Few will be surprised by the eventual revelations, but Kit's descent into madness will keep readers hooked, and Denman wisely doesn't pretend that mental illness is easily resolved. Ages 12–up.

December 1, 2009
Gr 10 Up-Kit, 17, is a troubled youth who is being led astray by his friend Ike. Just the previous year, he had a circle of friends, a wonderful girlfriend, and a place on the basketball team. Now he hangs out more and more with Ike, coerced into thinking that he should hike to the top of a mountain in Strathcona Park, British Columbia, and bury himself in the snow in order to preserve his body, to be found hundreds if not thousands of years in the future. At times, Kit seems to resent the fact that Ike will not be sacrificing himself while he is encouraging Kit to commit suicide. In the meantime, Kit's parents know something is wrong, but just don't know what has happened to their once easygoing, affable son. Readers will eventually recognize that Ike is not real, but a hallucination caused by the onset of schizophrenia. While the story is about a young man with a mental illness, it is also a well-told, readable mystery, brimming with suspense. An author's note giving details about schizophrenia adds an additional level of clarity to the novel's ending."Wendy Smith-D'Arezzo, Loyola College, Baltimore, MD"

Copyright 2009 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2009
Grades 7-10 With clinical exactitude, Denman takes a Vancouver teenager through progressively severe symptoms of schizophrenia. Egged on by a verbally abusive (and, as it turns out, imaginary) companion, Kit maps for himself an elaborate suicideall while blanking out at school and at home, meeting the concern of friends and family with ever sharper hostility, composing increasingly incoherent essays about modern society for supposed future readers, and suffering from delusions of persecution. The author closes her tale with Kit in a hospital bed after a dramatic last-minute rescue, but readers who are over needing their endings to be simple and happy would do well not to skip her afterword, in which she explains that this sort of mental illness is not entirely curable, or better yet follow up with Terry Truemans Inside Out (2003), which picks up on a similar case where this one leaves off.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)