I Never Promised You a Rose Garden Analysis

Fall is all about pumpkin carving, watching the leaves change colors, and taking a drive out to that mental hospital with bars on the windows, are we right? Er, maybe not that last one. But that's...

Want to read people's minds? Everyone's minds? Read a novel written in this point of view. Not many novels are written in third person omniscient these days, because modern readers seem to like foc...

Joanne Greenberg boarded the Reality Is King train long before it was fashionable.The author has admitted publicly that the novel is totally based on her own life. She spent three years in a mental...

Variety is the spice of life, right?Because this book is written in third-person omniscient point of view, the tone changes depending on whose head we're in at the moment. The two main tones come f...

Most of this novel is written from either the perspective of an incredibly intelligent teenage psychotic or the perspective of a highly educated, world-renowned psychotherapist. When the main chara...

The title I Never Promised You a Rose Garden comes from a therapy session Deborah has with Dr. Fried. It's a powerful moment that comes at the halfway mark of the novel. Deborah is struggling to de...

We don't get a Hollywood ending, folks. Deborah isn't all better.But Deborah is an admitted work in progress, so it's a good, honest ending. Deborah has earned her GED and has decided to celebrate...

Deborah is a smart cookie, so she makes a lot of references to history and literature that might be hard to catch. Throughout the novel, she also plies us with a lot of unusual, abstract descriptio...

Sixteen-year-old Deborah gets dropped off at a mental hospital after a suicide attempt gets her parents to realize their girl needs serious help. Deborah's been socially awkward and deeply troubled...

The CallDeborah's parents drop her off at a mental hospital because she's attempted suicide. Her emotional distance from the outside world is so extreme that her parents have finally sought help. D...

Deborah's parents admit her to a mental hospital in the countryside outside of Chicago; she'll be treated for severe mental illness that led to a suicide attempt.When she was five, Deborah had a tu...

Joanne Greenberg knows what she's talking about when it comes to mental illness. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1948 and was committed to a mental hospital in Maryland. Modern doctors have...

Okay, there isn't any actual sex in this book, but people do talk about it, and some of what they talk about is a little graphic. There's mention of a man flashing Deborah when she was young, for e...

Thomas Hobbes, LeviathanThe ward members give the nickname Leviathan nickname to Ellis. It's a reference to Hobbs, the D ward attendant who lacked empathy for the patients and treated them with det...