January 16

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Cover Reveal: MY LIFE IN THE FISH TANK by Barbara Dee

Posted by on January 16, 2020 in Author Posts | 4 Comments

There’s more than one way to tell a story.

That’s one of the things I’m hoping readers take away from MY LIFE IN THE FISH TANK (Aladdin/S&S, September 15, 2020).  It’s my eleventh middle grade novel, and a bit of a departure for me. Most of FISH TANK is a regular first-person narrative from the perspective of a seventh grader, but some chapters are plays, some are verse, some are flashbacks. Although it’s about a serious topic, there are many silly jokes. If I could draw, I’d have included drawings too–but I can’t, so I didn’t.

MY LIFE IN THE FISH TANK is about a family of four kids: Gabriel, a college freshman; Scarlett, a moody sixteen year old; Zinnia (aka Zinny), a twelve year old with a passion for marine biology; and Aiden, a third grader obsessed with a How To project for school. The family is derailed when Gabriel is diagnosed with bipolar disorder after crashing a car at school, and is sent to a residential treatment center. Zinny’s overwhelmed parents tell the kids to keep Gabriel’s situation “private”–which to Zinny sounds the same as “secret.” As Zinny comes to terms with the mental illness of her beloved big brother, she struggles with the burden of secrecy, coping by immersing herself in a crayfish study for science class and entertaining her anxious little brother with funny suggestions for his How To.

I could have written this story from Zinny’s perspective as a straight chronological middle grade novel, like MAYBE HE JUST LIKES YOU, EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT YOU and STAR-CROSSED. But I wrote FISH TANK with a fractured timeline because I was thinking that in real life few stories come at you in a linear way. And if you were a kid suddenly jolted by the news that a close family member had a mental illness (and, in fact,  had been dealing with it for some time) you’d likely replay his past behavior, looking for clues and signs, which might pop into your head in  unpredictable ways.

At the same time, as you were dealing with anxiety about your brother’s illness, messy everyday life would go on as usual–with school projects, friendship drama, unexpected crushes, family dinners. Anyone who’s been through a significant, difficult life event knows how necessary it is to compartmentalize the trauma. The way you force yourself to keep going is by keeping your eyes on other tracks, other plotlines.

One of Zinny’s biggest issues with her two best friends is that they won’t let her focus on anything but her brother. But Zinny feels more than just nonstop worry about Gabriel. A science nerd with a thing for biological nomenclature, she reflects:

There wasn’t a scientific name for my emotions, some long chewy Latin-sounding word that got more and more specific as it zoomed in on my heart. Sadnessalia  Numbveria Confusoria Worryatum.

And my feelings kept changing, anyway. Sometimes I didn’t feel anything at all. Sometimes I was even happy, like when I was helping Ms. Molina in the lab. So was that happiness–even if it lasted just an eyeblink–supposed to go into the scientific name, too? Or would people be all, How dare you distract yourself, Zinny. You should be a sobbing mess every single second!

If you know my work, you’ve probably read another middle grade novel of mine, HALFWAY NORMAL, which I wrote after my oldest son’s yearlong cancer treatment. That book could not have been written except through personal experience. And yet it wasn’t specifically about my son, or about my family.

In a way, MY LIFE IN THE FISH TANK is more personal than HALFWAY NORMAL. It’s about the effect of one child’s serious illness on the rest of the family–how a family struggles, clashes, forgives, accepts, supports, and even laughs through the biggest challenges. How one family member–in the case of FISH TANK, a twelve year old girl– processes and copes with the emotional turmoil triggered by that experience.

It’s a story I wasn’t ready to tell when I wrote HALFWAY NORMAL.

MY LIFE IN THE FISH TANK has many threads, some dark, some light.

It’s not just about mental illness. It’s also about family, friends, school, pizza, and crayfish.

Some chapters are sad. Some are funny. Some are both.

It’s personal, and it’s completely fiction.

Because I believe there’s more than one way to tell a story. And that every way is its own kind of truth.

 

MY LIFE IN THE FISH TANK (Aladdin/S&S, September 15, 2020) is Barbara Dee‘s eleventh middle grade novel. MAYBE HE JUST LIKES YOU (2019) was one of the Washington Post’s Best Books of 2019, a 2019 Cybils finalist, a 2019 Nerdies winner (Middle Grade Fiction) and one of A Mighty Girl’s 2019 Books of the Year. EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT YOU (2018) was a 2019 CCBC Choice for Fiction and one of the 2019 Bank Street Best Children’s Books of the Year. HALFWAY NORMAL (2017) was named to state lists in Vermont, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Maryland and South Carolina. STAR-CROSSED (2017) was a Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist, on the ALA Rainbow List Top Ten, and on best-of-the-year lists by the public libraries of Chicago, Seattle and Cleveland Heights.  STAR-CROSSED and HALFWAY NORMAL were 2018 NCSS-CBC Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People.  Barbara lives in Westchester County, NY, and is one of the founders of the Chappaqua Children’s Book Festival.