Fig by Sarah Elizabeth Schantz

When I first read the plot summary for Fig, I was immediately intrigued and made it a point to purchase the book.  It deals with mental illness, a topic that tends to be expressed very well in young adult fiction.  I count The Perks of Being a Wallflower, It's Kind of a Funny Story, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Looking for Alaska, and Challenger Deep among some of my absolute favorite reads, so I was excited to see if Fig would be another addition to my favorites list.  Happily, it was.  I loved this one. 

Fig, by Sarah Elizabeth Schantz, is a novel about a young girl growing up in a family touched by mental illness.  Fig's mother, Annie, is diagnosed with schizophrenia and Fig herself struggles with OCD and anxiety.  The novel, narrated by Fig, tells the story of her life from ages 6 to 19 as she starts learning to live with her mother's increasingly erratic behavior and then tries to cure it through a series of bizarre rituals.  The rituals Fig tries using to help her mother, such as avoiding certain colors on certain days or going without food or water on others, only serve to exacerbate her own mental issues and send her into a spiral of despair.  She engages in self-harm and worries constantly that she will manifest signs of schizophrenia when she turns 19, like her mother did.  Eventually, things at home deteriorate and Annie is committed to a mental institution.  When she is released, Fig must learn to accept her mother's illness while making strides to improve her own mental health.

Fig is a beautiful novel, told through vivid imagery and symbolism.  As Fig is the narrator, the reader is forced to view events through the lens of her mental illness, which adds a layer of complexity to a difficult and emotional story.  This is a book for readers who like to think, wrestle with images and consider different perspectives.  It is not a fast-paced reading experience, rather, it is a story that asks its readers to grow with its characters and watch how they change over time.

Annie's character is well-written, and Schantz is careful to show her personality before the schizophrenia changes her.  In this way, both Fig and the reader are able to watch a woman who is an intelligent, feminist, hippie kind of person morph into someone who has completely lost touch with reality. Similarly, the reader watches Fig change through her narration, from a more or less normal kid to someone constantly frightened, worried and increasingly controlled by the rituals she invents to survive.

While Fig and her mother are the central characters in the story, the rest of Fig's family are well developed and play important roles in the novel.  Watching Fig's father close himself off and turn cold as the woman he married slips further and further away from him was disturbing, as was reading Fig's grandmother's passive aggressive barbs toward Annie - which were normal for a possessive mother-in-law but took on a dark tone in light of the family's struggle. 

I very much enjoyed this novel and I think that it presents an emotional and honest-feeling story about how families are affected by mental illness.  My one slight criticism is that the end of the novel felt a little too thick on the symbolism, making the actual events of the story seem a bit unclear and rushed.  Ultimately though, I thought this was one of my best reads of the month.  This is Schantz's first novel, and I'm excited to read what she comes up with next.