Special Topics in English 
 This is a young adult novel. I am a decidedly older adult; my children are long out of their teens, and my grandchildren are not yet into them. So I don't represent the target group, even by proxy. And yet Meg Wolitzer did such a superb job of writing about teenage characters in The Interestings, and I have such respect for her as a writer, period, that I was very interested to see how she would tackle writing not just about but also for teens. It seems to me she handles it superbly. 
 Reading the book description, I did wonder if this was going to be Interestings-lite. There, we had a small group of talented friends bonding at a summer camp; here we have a similar group at a Vermont boarding school for talented teens who may be psychologically fragile. As in the earlier book, we even have a in-group of the chosen: the Special Topics in English class hand-picked by its teacher, Mrs. Quennell. It soon becomes clear that the five students in the class are all damaged by trauma. Casey has been confined to a wheelchair; Sierra has lost her brother; Marc's family has broken up; Griffin, who grew up on a local farm, is afraid of fire; and Jam (for Jamaica) Gallahue, the novel's narrator, has lost the love of her life, an exchange student from England called Reeve. Very soon, all comparisons have been forgotten; you are completely drawn into these kids and their personalities, and swept up by Jam's voice, whose balance between humor and pain Wolitzer has judged perfectly. 
 Pronounce "Belzhar" with a J sound for the "zh" and you get... heck, the book is even illustrated on the cover! For the Special Topic in Mrs. Q's class is of course Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, her life, and poetry. When she announces this, the students raise red flags: is it, well, wise to study a book dealing with suicide with kids who have been classed as fragile? Frankly, I wondered too. But neither teacher nor author goes anywhere near suicide. In other respects, Wolitzer treats her readers as near-adults: they clearly know the swearing, sex, and drugs that are so much a part of the big world, and may even have experimented a little themselves, though Wolitzer is careful to keep their actual behavior moderate. Indeed, for the first third of the book, her storytelling, without ever being preachy, is almost a primer on how to work with young people to restore their broken sense of themselves. And about the power of words. 
 "Belzhar," it turns out, relates not to the Plath book, but to the other part of Mrs. Q's requirement: that the students fill in the old-fashioned journals she hands out for them. Whenever a student begins to write in a journal, Wolitzer steps away from her realistic story to enter a kind of time-warp. I did wonder if she needed to, but then I came to accept these moments as a metaphor for the kind of healing that happens in real life. One by one, we learn more about the nature of each student's trauma, and begin to see how they might get past it. But it is far from a matter of counting down the numbers; Wolitzer is wonderfully varied in her reveals, and even allows room for occasional setbacks (one of them very serious). And she is good at teasers. Jam had opened the book with her tragedy ("I was sent here because of a boy. His name was Reeve..."), yet it is not until the very end that we find out what happened. When we do, I wondered whether Wolitzer had not once again changed the unwritten rules, but I came to accept the rightness of this too. This is an author who understands young people. What she has written is truly a gift to them, and to their parents.