Rating: 
Summary: Complex and real.
Review: One young lady explains her journey with Borderline Personality Disorder and how the girls she met in a mental hospital impacted her life and recovery. If anything, I wish the story would have had more details about the girls. Yes, the movie is exciting, but the book is more realistic. Ms. Kaysen brings awesome mind-twisting theories to life and mental health. I suggest this book is a good one for short reading and deep thinking.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant
Review: Ok I have read the previous reviews and I thought I would but my two cents in. This book should be read by every young girl. I should have read this book in high school. Being a physics major in college I had to love the references in the opening chapter and the tittle Topology of an Unknown Universe. I was a very smart, intelligent, high strung, low self esteem, and artistic young girl who never saw mental illness comming. I am a boarderline personality. It is one of the most misunderstood medical conditions ever. Every high school student is taught about the dangers of drug use, eating disorders, and the like, but no one teaches you how to deal with your own mental limits and in pushing them pushing your own bounds of reality. Reading this book was like staring in my soul.
Rating:
Summary: A poetic rendering of a bygone era of psychiatric therapy
Review: Susanna Kaysen dealt with mental and psychic pain in a fairly common way: an attempted suicide. The year was 1967, the infancy of psychotropic drugs, when psychotherapy was in its hey-day. Girl Interrupted is Kaysen's memoir of two years spent in an expensive and exclusive psychiatric unit, previous guests having been Sylvia Plath, James Taylor, and Ray Charles, among others.
The wit, wisdom, wackiness, and lyricism of 'a madhouse' come through clearly in the author's writing, and she offers vivid and insightful accounts of daily life, her fellow 'guests,' and the link between art and madness which often manifests itself in manic depression, or as we have lately been taught to say, Bipolar Disorder.
A good read, and a pretty good movie...
Rating: 
Summary: Too Complex
Review: Seeing as how I'm reviewing books for high schoolers I doubt they could comprehend the deeper feelings that are in this book. A really good book, but may be too complex for average high school students. Having seen the movie before I read the book, made it a little easier to understand. There are a lot of difficult words. Also the book goes back and forth through time. It doesn't flow from point A to point B, it goes from A, to D to B back to A and so on.
Rating:
Summary: Girl Interrupted Book Review
Review: For Susanna Kasen, her life was too interrupted. Reading Girl Interrupted, you get to read Susanna's thoughts and feelings while going on a trip with her mind. Reality and perception is what this 18-year-old battles against. Finding it easy to focus on the book, just like Susanna, you are faced with concepts about life. You may find it difficult to be content with your own thoughts. Reading this book might make you unhappy with your own thoughts as this kind of poetic form of writing traps you in her mind. You become engaged and vulnerable to the ideas of life and it's reality. You might find yourself questioning, or often wondering, trying to analyze and observe what you can not comprehend. You at least try to understand her thoughts. At first, Susanna doesn't express herself and she is in denial about her problem. She didn't think that she had a borderline personality, she just thought that it was the world with the problem. Slowly, but surly, she pieces together her life in a psychiatric hospital.
If you are looking to read a book that grabs your thought and pulls you into a different dimension, and is full of different perceptions, then this is the book for you. Susanna Kasen's insanity will give you an idea about what it's like for her and others like her.
Rating:
Summary: Good read, but ultimately lacking something...
Review: I read this book with high hopes. Ultimately, I wasn't disappointed. "Girl, Interrupted" is the true story of writer Susanna Kaysen's teenage years. After attempting suicide, she is forced to commit herself to a psychiatric hospital. She is diagnosed as "borderline personality disorder." This "disorder" is one that affects almost every woman in the country, no matter how sane they are. The novel also introduces us to the women who share Susanna's life. Some will get to see the outside world again, some won't. The reason I gave this novel only 4 stars is because I felt that it lacked something. Usually, I can read a book over and over again. For Girl, Interrupted, I'd have to be REALLY bored. Maybe it's that Kaysen didn't give us enough to emotionally identify with the characters. Still, Kaysen is a brave woman and I respect her story.
Rating:
Summary: Short and sweet!
Review: I think the title of this review says it all, short and sweet! I read this book in about two hours and LOVED it. I bought this book wanting to see how far off the movie was. I was surprised at the differences between the two. I recommend this book to anyone who watched the movie and wondered what Susanna was writing in her journal, how well the characters were portrayed, and just who made it out "by the 70's".
Rating:
Summary: Very Good and MUCH BETTER than the movie
Review: I throughly enjoyed reading this book. While it was hard to follow at times because of the nature of it and the "skipping around," I think it was a wonerful story. Kaysen's tramatized young adulthood can relate well to the plight of young girls today. For teenage women, mothers, educators of girls, and counselors this is a must-read.
Rating:
Summary: One of my heroes
Review: I like this woman...I think I really like this woman. Kaysen has given me a blueprint for my own memoir. It's well written and it tends to give you her point of view on things, which is very, very good..."normal people" have a hard time understanding us strange ones, lol.
Rating:
Summary: A great book
Review: Susanna is a great writer and obviously has an unusual story to tell. Since the circumstances of the story are so interesting, as a writer all Susanna needs to do is "get out of the way" and I think she does this well. She has a terse writing style which I find appealing. Her character descriptions are first rate, and I think she has a subtle but keen sense of humor. She and Kay Jamison ("An Unquiet Mind") have written the finest mental illness memoirs available. Avery Z. Conner, author of "Fevers of the Mind".
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