I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

By Hannah Green, Joanne Greenberg, joanne [ hannah green] greenberg

Book Overview

The multimillion-copy bestselling modern classic of autobiographical fiction about a young woman's struggle with mental health, featuring a new foreword by Esm Weijun Wang, the New York Times bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias, and a new afterword by the author

Also available from Penguin Classics: Joanne Greenberg's bestselling modern classic In This Sign

After making an attempt on her own life, sixteen-year-old Deborah Blau is diagnosed with schizophrenia. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a psychiatric hospital many hours from her home in suburban Chicago. Here she will spend the next three years, trying, with the help of a gifted psychiatrist, to find a path back to her "normal" life, and to emerge from the imaginary Kingdom of Yr in which she has sought refuge.

A semiautobiographical novel originally published under the pen name Hannah Green just a year after Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar--a very different portrait of psychological breakdown--I Never Promised You a Rose Garden remains, more than half a century later, a timeless and ultimately hopeful book, ripe for rediscovery by a new generation eager to erase the stigma of mental illness.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0143136992
• ISBN13: 9780143136996
• Release Date: May 2022
• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 7.8"
• Age Range: 12 to 17 years
• Grade Range: Grades 7 to 12

Customer Reviews

Brilliant

Simply the best. This I have decided is in the top 3 best books I have ever read. It is absolutely brilliant. If I would have known the impact this book would have on me I would have read it long ago! I have never related so much to a character in my life-and what a character she is! This is the most intelligently written, luscious book, I have ever read. I will not ever be able to put this book into words that do it justice. You must simply read it for yourself.

Oh, my.

This was a deeply moving, INSTENSE book that shook me when I read it and took me right through Deborah Blau's experiences of being Schizophrenic. It was an amazing read! I recommend it to everyone willing to read something like this!

A young girl's journey to health

I read and loved this book as an adolescent. I recently saw it at the library and decided to take it out and read it again. I just finished re-reading it and found it as powerful as I remembered, possibly even more so.I Never Promised You a Rose Garden presents a complete picture of mental illness from the patient's point of view, without the stigma of wrongness that is frequently associated with it. The picture painted is a very real one, from Deborah's relief when the doctors confirm what she's known all along, that something is not right, to the way her family deals with the fact of her illness. Greenberg/Green evokes very strong emotions with her writing. You feel Deborah's fear that her secret world of Yr will punish her for revealing its existence to her doctor, and you share in her triumph when she begins to make her way back to the world. I put down this book with a little more understanding of how it must feel to be mentally ill. I would recommend it to anyone, teen or adult.

My favorite as a teen, now re-read as an adult

I always loved this book when I was a teenager - I must have read it at least 4-5 times (actually, I'm an avid reader, so that isn't really that unusual). However, I have just re-read the book at 30, after 5 years of treatment for my own mental disorders, and have seen so much in the book that I never saw before. Perhaps this book appealed to me so much as an unkowingly sick teen because I could relate to Deborah Blau, although her disorder is of an entirely different type and scale from mine. I must say that this book should be required reading for anyone dealing with a loved-one's journey towards mental health. One thing people without these problems can't understand is that it is easier to stay sick - that getting healthy is hard work, scary, and LONG! And along the way, the symptoms may get worse, while you're actually getting better. This book is the first time I've seen someone try to explain this phenomenom - that the mentally ill cling to their symptoms as to a life-line, using them as protection while they heal, until the reach the point where those symptoms are no longer needed. After re-reading this book, I understand my own treatment so much better, and will recommend it to my loved-ones who have to deal with my treatment - maybe they can get a glimmer of understanding. It is rare in this world for any "healthy" person to truly understand mental illness