While D. K. Yamashiro admits that he had no intention of writing a YA book during his career, he comes to the genre with a unique background story: While hiking in Hawaii when he was 18, the author fell from a 400-foot cliff and survived. The physical, mental, and spiritual trauma caused by his accident—and his astonishing yet gruelingly difficult recovery—serve as vital inspiration in his debut YA book, Anela’s Club, which Kirkus calls “an inspiring story of teenage resilience and how trauma need not be an insurmountable obstacle.”

As the author relates, his survival on that (legitimately) fateful night decades ago was nothing short of miraculous: “The captain of the rescue squad told my parents, ‘I just cannot explain how your son landed where he did, given his body weight and momentum. He should have landed straight on the road, but somehow he landed in this cleft. And the only way I can describe it is that it’s like a giant hand caught him.’” Understandably, that “game-changing” night affected the trajectory of his life immensely, leading to a deepened Christian faith as well as a dedication to studying the effects of protracted physical and mental trauma—and helping sufferers with the coping process.

Yamashiro, a guest lecturer at Harvard and an affiliate and faculty chaplain at MIT, uses his experience of trauma to inform the story of his title character, Anela, an intelligent, strong-minded, 15-year-old high school student whose dreams of higher education are hampered by her persistent grief over her older brother’s recent, tragic death; her alcoholic father’s absenteeism; and her mother’s struggles to hold it all together, emotionally, mentally, and financially.

While the narrative remains firmly grounded in Anela’s well-rendered teenage point of view, Yamashiro introduces a host of intriguing secondary characters who round out the story. These include not just the typical YA cast of flighty friends and potential romantic partners, but also Anela’s two primary guiding lights (beyond her mother): Miss DeGracia, the social studies teacher who grasps the gravity of Anela’s dysfunctional home life, yet believes in her writing talents and encourages her to enter an essay contest, and a progressive local senator, Nastasia Yen Strasberg, who shows the promising young student the power of perseverance through the inspirational stories of presidents and other leaders who overcame adversity to change the world.

The arena of presidential literature, certainly vast terrain, is familiar for Yamashiro, whose doctoral dissertation focuses on the childhood trauma of American presidents, a motif he interweaves capably into Anela’s scholastic journey. “That’s the gap in the literature that I identified, regarding the formational aspect of leadership,” he notes. “Presidential lives are always lived in crisis because there’s so much going on. They don’t have time for a lot of reflection, so they must make decisions based on what they know in the moment. But even when you know something is the ‘rational’ thing to do, why is it that we often do something else? Is there something else that motivates us, and could it trace back to an experience we had in childhood, perhaps a traumatic moment? That’s where I began looking at trauma and other elements from a person’s past as influential variables on presidential decisions.”

Throughout the book, Yamashiro brings us into Anela’s typically fraught teenage psyche, as she constantly wrestles with the possible consequences of her own decisions, whether involving her relationship with her mother or her academic aspirations:

If I was so smart, why couldn’t I get rid of the countless things holding me back? Why couldn’t I accept my parents’ neglect as their problem and not mine? Instead, I was always looking at myself, trying to figure out what was wrong with me that made them not care. I could never figure it out, though, and the chasm between us grew wider, until there wasn’t a bridge long enough to cross it.

The anger had taken root inside me again, and I figured I might as well deal with it instead of burying it. I had to reason it into submission.…Education was the one constant light in my existence and the only path to take if I wanted to rise instead of fall.…No one was threatening my chance to jam my head full of knowledge.

Later, Anela grapples with the intricacies of essay writing and her sincere hope to craft a message that could serve as inspiration to anyone going through similarly difficult circumstances. “As proficient as I was at writing essays, this one was different,” writes Yamashiro. “I had five thousand words to splay my heart across the page and engage the reader from beginning to end. Using trauma to better one’s life was a tough subject. I hoped to make other kids in traumatic situations aware that they weren’t alone; they had options.”

Anela’s desire to help kids like her stems from the many role models introduced by Sen. Strasberg. As she continues her journey of discovery, she gleans further inspiration from the personal stories of significant figures both present (Malala Yousafzai is a consistent presence in the text) and past, including Anne Frank:

Where others saw darkness, Anne saw light. Despite her circumstances, she believed there was still hope. And while she was physically unable to go outside, she wrote that no one had the power to confine her mind. Writing was her escape; she described her fears, frustrations, moments of happiness, and the dreams of a girl on the verge of womanhood. She spoke of a mother who didn’t understand her, a sister who felt distant…If Anne Frank can have hope when surrounded by misery, who am I to doubt the light at the end of the tunnel?

Finding light at the end of the tunnel may be a cliche in certain cases, but it rings true as the primary theme in Anela’s Club, which, as our critic noted, presents adversity “as something that, if not surrendered to, can shape an individual—an important lesson for readers of any age.” Credit Yamashiro for his believable portrayal of resiliency, a portrait born from the author’s well-earned redemption story.

“The awakening within me came with a lot of struggle, years and years of depression,” says Yamashiro, who notes that, during those arduous years of recovery, his Christian faith was paramount: “Thank you, God, for saving me and giving me another chance,” he recalls praying. “If you can make something of a broken person like me, with stitches all over his emaciated body, walking with a cane at age 18, like an 80-year-old man…If you can do that, I’ll do whatever you want me to do. I’ll go where you want me to go. I’ll say what you want me to say. I’ll be what you want me to be.”

In Anela’s case, notes the author, her “resilience emerges in a hopeful way,” offering an instructive character study sure to resonate with YA readers of all ages.

Eric Liebetrau is a freelance writer and editor based in Charleston, S.C. He is a former longtime managing and nonfiction editor of Kirkus Reviews, and his work has appeared in a variety of national publications.