MAD LOVE

The daughter of a bestselling romance novelist feels forced to keep a terrible secret when her mother is hospitalized with bipolar disorder in this unique, heartfelt and fantastical romance. When unpaid bills jeopardize her mother’s care and her publisher threatens litigation surrounding her unfulfilled contract, 16-year-old Alice decides she must write the novel in question. By fateful coincidence, a strange boy named Errol appears on the scene and, claiming to be Cupid, is desperate to tell her the true story of his and Psyche’s mythic love affair. Buoyed by wryly funny dialogue, this packs a lot into its pages—a love interest for Alice, her anguish over her mother’s illness, Errol’s tragic predicament and several well-executed subplots involving Alice’s neighbors. While all of these balls are convincingly kept aloft until the very end, their resolution in a sort of epilogue seems somewhat too neat for all of the messy subject matter tackled in the story—but perhaps it is, as Alice suggests to Errol, “what the readers want…They want happily ever after.” (Fantasy. 12 & up)