It won the School Library Journal Best Book Award. Another exploration of the very real and painful world of the learning-disabled child.

    It is also a tale of mothers and daughters, their mutual rebellion and unconscious mimicry. Rose grew up with an emotionally crippled, narcissistic mother while her father, a veteran gambler, spent his waking hours in the garden cut off from his wife's harangues. Now an adult, Rose works her way through a string of unhealthy love(less) affairs. After a brief, unhappy marriage, she slips more deeply and dangerously into the lair of a parasitic, cocaine-fed artist whose sensual and manipulative ways she grows addicted to in the bohemian squalor of Venice.

    Sedgwick argues that mental health movements have overemphasised individual civil liberty at the expense of developing collective responsibility for mental health care.