Sparrow (2017) by Sarah Moon

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Sparrow (2017)

by Sarah Moon

Pacific Street and Fourth Ave., Boerum Hill, Brooklyn NY.

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 5/28

New York: 70/105

     I briefly considered checking out the Audiobook of Sparrow, a 2017 YA Novel about an African-American girl with some kind of social anxiety disorder, but I was like, "I'd better read this one!"  Good choice, as it turned out.  I was reading this book while thinking about a recent New York Times article that highlighted recent studies that have questioned the positive impact of large-scale (i.e. school/government) intervention on the mental health of children. The article, Are School Too Focused on Mental Health? brings into play several evidence based observations that run along the lines of, "Maybe talking incessantly about have basically every child has mental health issues isn't the best way to diminish the negative effect of those issues/lessen the prevalence of those issues. "

  You needn't be a child to understand the path taken by schools/government- older Americans will remember the clumsy, government sanctioned school programs, of "DARE" and the "Just Say No" campaign, risible campaigns that only made drugs seem cool and familiar.  I don't have children, but I do have a great deal of professional and familial understanding of mental health issues, and I thought Sparrow was a pretty good example of all that is ridiculous in the treatment of mental health issues in progressive society- here represented by the upscale neighborhood of contemporary Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.

  The whole plot is built around the fact that Sparrow, a 14 year old girl with no articulated trauma in her life beyond a busy, professional single mother (she works in IT for a finance company), is so painfully shy that she disassociates by pretending she is a bird flying away.  It's the second book in a row to use dissociating by adolescent African-American girls as a plot device.  In the Edwidge Dannicat book I just read, Breath, Eyes, Memory , the character disassociated because her mother was performing virginity checks on a weekly basis by inserting her fingers into the narrator's private parts.  Here, Sparrow is shy.   Impossible not to compare the two main characters.  Next to the Sophie of the Dannicat novel, Sparrow looks ridiculous.  

   It's also another work of contemporary American fiction dealing with mental health issues where no one exercises during the entire book.   Instead, Sparrow finds her release by going to a "Girls Who Rock" camp and learning to play bass.  That's cool, but again, I felt like some of the mental health issues in this book could have been handled by having someone run around a track a couple times a week.   If you go back and you look at the actual history of psychiatry- there was not a lot of exercise going on there.   The people who developed psychiatric care looked down on "physical culture" and they never really got over it.