The Burn Journals by Brent Runyon

This is a memoir of a fourteen-year-old boy's failed suicide attempt and the subsequent recovery and healing process of both body and spirit. As you can probably gather from the title of the book, the young man is burned terribly. He discusses the long, painful experience of burn care in graphic detail. He also describes his reticence or inability to speak insightfully about the inner despair that led this terrible act of self-destruction.

As I read this book, I found myself wincing in vicarious pain. I squirmed in my subway seat while reading about the involved skin-grafting procedures the narrator endured. As I read on, I became a bit frustrated and impatient with the narrator's "flat" attitude. I wanted him to come to a revelation about the root of his depression. But this book is honest, and doesn't include the happy Hollywood ending we get used to with this kind of story. And this honesty, while sometimes maddening, is also the beauty of this book.

I would be interested to hear from others who have read this book. Does this story appeal to young readers? Although it is told from the point of view of a teenage boy, I wonder if teenage boys can relate to the ambivalent narrator. I wonder if anyone else sometimes became almost angry about the narrator's insistence on superficiality to avoid deeper sorrows.

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