Saturday Review: “Living With Compulsions” a review by Patricia A. Dunn
Halli Gomez. List of Ten (2021) in NCLR Online Winter 2024
Our 2024 Winter Online issue is coming very soon!
[Editorial: the following excerpt and the full review contain references to intentional self-harm]
Dunn writes another of our feature section reviews. She says, “This novel, winner of the 2021 North Carolina AAUW Award for Young People’s Literature, is an engaging, heart-wrenching, but ultimately hopeful story of Troy,” a teenager living with Tourette’s Syndrome and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. The novel breaks from stereotypes in portraying a disabled person as “normal” person, not a sad or heroic fictionalization.
Gomez, “too, lives with Tourette’s, and she says she wrote this book “To let those who have neurological disorders, or are contemplating suicide, know they are not alone” (349). The author’s own experience with
this disability brings an authenticity to Troy’s painful body movements and inner thoughts.”
Dunn remarks, “Gomez’s novel is an eye-opening and authentic glimpse into experiences most of us did not know existed.” Literature allows story-tellers to share their personal wisdom and story-readers to learn and feel empathy.
Read the entire review and buy the book from your local independent bookstore.
