12th September (broadcast on 2nd July)
A podcast review by radio programme 'Faster Than Light'.
Excerpts from the review:
"a book that really stunned me... It's strong stuff'... Good on Faber for publishing it and making it available. It's certainly an area of a lot of young people's lives, and I think it's an area that needs explanation... I found it fascinating."
The full review can be listened to here (the Red Tears review is about a quarter of the way in)
1st July 2007
A Year 10 pupil from Canberra gives a personal review
Red Tears is a very powerful novel; it is written by Joanna Kenrick. Previous to writing Red Tears, Joanna Kenrick researched scrupulously for the book by spending months speaking on websites and going to psychiatric sessions. The fact that she has met people with depression and studied depression has its effect on the book with the real-like situations and conditions of the protagonist.
Emily Bowyer is normal teenager; she's in her final years of high school, has great friends, and a loving family. Her life is good and easy, until, in the space of a few weeks, her life completely turns around. Her friends abandon her, she drives her family away from her, and she finds that she can't handle all the homework she's getting. So she turns to self-harm. It starts as one cut on her upper arm with a pencil sharpener blade. It soon escalates into many cuts, almost once a day; one gets infected, and someone finds out.
Red Tears is an interesting novel. It deals with teenagers lives, how they see it as everyone against them, and nobody caring. If parents were to read this novel, it would remind them that it still sucks to be a teenager. This is one of the best books I have read in a while, I picked it up and I couldn't put it down. I'd probably give it four stars out of five, and recommend it to people fifteen years old and over.
Brady, Year 10, Canberra, Australia
From Allen & Unwin Teacher Resources
Red Tears is a very well written account of a student's self-harming. It is captivating, easy to read and honest. Joanna Kenrick has taught me a lot about the thoughts and feelings of young people struggling with this issue.
The setting is in the high school and home life of 'Emily', a GCSE (VCE) student. She is under a lot of pressure to study and pass exams. Although she is a bright student, Emily faces a crisis when her friends desert her and her family assumes that everything is alright. With no one to turn to, Emily begins cutting herself to relieve the pressure of built up emotions. She really doesn't seem to be able to express her feelings in an appropriate way. Her controlled family life and the needs of her younger brother are added pressures for a young girl whose life has become isolated and out of control. The eventual discovery by family, peers and staff isolate her further, but are catalysts for the healing process to begin.
This book is well written, has given me a much better idea of the insights to self harming and more compassion for affected students in the pressures they face. It has challenged me as a parent to ensure that I am relating to my children more meaningfully and not to assume that I know how they are. I actually had some very meaningful discussions with my children following the reading of Red Tears. It would be an excellent class book with a lot of room for discussion around issues of self esteem and acceptance. It is definitely senior fiction though and is very graphic, even shocking in its detail. I would highly recommend Red Tears as a must read by teachers, parents and older high school students.
Linda Marx, Mountain District Christian School, VIC
The perfect life of teenager Emily Bowyer - good friends, caring family, excellent school results - is only a façade. The reality is that of friends freezing her out, tantamount to bullying, best friend Lizzie drawn to Marianne, leaving Emily feeling abandoned and jealous, and jealousy too of younger brother, Anthony, whose learning difficulties appear to monopolise her parents. Emily sees them as constantly putting pressure on her to do well, her mother nagging, her father often weak.
School-wise, unrealistically high expectations cause Emily to crumble in the face of her quest for perfection. She is overwhelmed, in the depths of mental anguish, believing herself "a pathetic loser who needs to be punished", a "bundle of mistakes and failures", frightened of humiliation, in a life out of control. Self harm becomes the unhealthy, dangerous focus for Emily's fear, escalating from her earlier hitting in the head and pinching thighs, temporarily replacing misery and despair with exhilaration after the cutting, and a sense of serenity, as she gives permission to care for herself after each incident, her secret a method of control, a cry for help.
Sensitively told, Red Tears, the title symbolic of the blood from each cut and the pain which caused those tears of hate and shame, takes the reader on Emily's emotional roller coaster journey through the gut wrenching, heart breaking gloom. "I am dull, boring, I have no life". Emily begins to question her own sanity. She is drawn to the new girl, Patrice, herself a victim of abuse in the home. Emily's hidden feelings are faced in psychotherapy sessions, as she comes to an awareness of the problems which trigger her cutting. Relationships can be repaired, healing can begin.
The nature of the content of this novel is chilling, brutal, confronting, the prose powerful, the action graphic, so a warning to readers from teachers and Teacher Librarian is implicit in regard to this title, especially for consideration as a shared class reader. However, the harsh reality of the issue of self harm to our adolescents is such that Red Tears, despite its English setting, cannot be overlooked for inclusion in the school library for readers aged 14+, as a thought provoking discussion starter. That there can be a positive resolution through the pathos, acceptance from anxiety, progress beyond pain, and hope from self-hate, is a sure recommendation for Red Tears.
Alison Cassell, QLD
9th June 2007, Canberra Times, Australia (review by Ronni Phillips)