USA Today
It starts with an odd, metallic taste in Elise Blazek's mouth when she is a freshman at Princeton. What follows are 27 years of debilitating mental illness, soaring manic highs and plunges into the depths of suicidal depression. Her mother, Irena, a Czech immigrant who wanted her daughter to have all the opportunities that America offered, watches helplessly as her only child's bright future dims and their relationship is strained by the weight of unspoken truths. But despite the years of alienation, the bond between mother and child survives. Patricia Grossman has written a beautiful story of how families love—and forgive.
—Korina Lopez, Sept. 23, 2010
from Belletrista
. . . More than just another mental illness story, Radiant Daughter explores the depths of both madness and love, the divisions between cultures and generations, and the meaning of family and true friendship. It is an intense, beautifully written, and hauntingly sad novel that, in Grossman's more than capable hands, still celebrates the resilience of the human heart and the persistence of hope.
—Deborah Montuori, Nov/Dec, 2010
from The San Fransico Book Review
This is a novel worth reading. —Leslie Wolfson, Nov. 7, 2010
Curled Up With a Good Book
. . . Although this particular enmeshment of mother and daughter may be situational, outside the norm of everyday experience, the author presents not only valuable insights into the nature of rapid cycling bipolar disorder but also the tangled web of family expectations, a relationship filled with landmines even without the extra burden of mental illness. Frightening in its unchecked intensity and destructiveness, the novel offers hope for existing in a world where a young woman feels she is “eating her own brain,” her grand schemes turned to ashes by the extremes of a troubled mind. There is peace, medication, accommodation, lessened expectations, life made manageable in small moments. Even the bonds of mother and daughter are stronger than that which would destroy them, a heartening message for others so afflicted.
—Luan Gaines, Nov. 21, 2010
Booklist
. . . Grossman tells a powerful story that is both heartbreaking and hopeful about the enduring bond between a mother and daughter despite generational differences, cultural disparities, and a tenacious mental illness constantly pushing the strength of their bond to the limit.
— Carolyn Kubisz, July 1, 2010
Publishers Weekly
. . . Ultimately, Irena rallies around her daughter with a fierce maternal sympathy, offering a fragile closure to this unsentimental story of one family's gossamer dreams. —June, 28, 2010
Recommended in
The Advocate, publication of the National Alliance on Mental Heath (NAMI), Sept. 2010