When Reason Breaks

Cover for When Reason Breaks
A thoughtful read about two teen girls experiencing depression in different ways.

When Reason Breaks

A Goth girl with an attitude problem, Elizabeth Davis must learn to control her anger before it destroys her. Emily Delgado appears to be a smart, sweet girl with a normal life, but as depression clutches at her, she struggles to feel normal. Both girls are in Ms. Diaz’s English class, where they connect to the words of Emily Dickinson. Both are hovering on the edge of an emotional precipice. One of them will attempt suicide. And with Dickinson’s poetry as their guide, both girls must conquer their personal demons to ever be happy.

In an emotionally taut novel that is equal parts literary and commercial, with a richly diverse cast of characters, readers will relish in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and be completely swept up in the turmoil of two girls fighting for their lives.

Practical information

Author: Cindy L. Rodriguez
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication year: 2015
ISBN: 9781619634121
Age category: young adult
Disabilities portrayed: depression, mental illness
Genre: contemporary

Accessible formats


audiobook available

Author

Cindy L. Rodriguez

Cindy L. Rodriguez was a newspaper reporter for The Hartford Courant and researcher at The Boston Globe before becoming a public school teacher. She is now a reading specialist at a Connecticut middle school. Cindy is a U.S.-born Latina of Puerto Rican and Brazilian descent. She has degrees from UConn and CCSU. Her debut contemporary YA novel, When Reason Breaks, released with Bloomsbury Children’s Books (2015). She had an essay in Life Inside My Mind, which released with Simon Pulse (2018).

When I was depressed, I didn’t think I had a right to be because, like my characters, nothing tragic had happened to me. I wanted to have a significant event, something I could point to and say, “Ah-ha, that’s the reason. If I address this one, obvious, horrible thing that happened to me, then I’ll be okay.” But I didn’t have that thing. Many depressed people don’t. And with the absence of something obviously wrong in my life, I pushed through the days for far too long, thinking what some people might think about my characters: my problems weren’t significant enough. This kind of thinking can lead to tragedy because the depression goes untreated, which I’ve discovered happens often in the Latin@ community.
(Latinxs in Kidlit, February 2015)

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The parallel journeys of Emily and Elizabeth allow author Rodriguez to explore two different expressions of depression, and show her deep understanding of the manifold ways that depression affects people.