Rating: 
Summary: My Favorite Book
Review: I read this book as a high school freshman and have re-read it reguarly ever since. There's always a new dimension of emotion and another similarity between Deborah's blatant maddness and the suble lunacy that plauges the world. This book also poses the question, "Who's Really Crazy?" Deborah with her Yr, or the mad mad world with all its lies deciet and pain? You decide.
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Summary: Schizophrenia in richly woven detail-Adults read this too!
Review: ~ ~ ~One thing I've noticed is that most people who have read this book had it recommended to them as an adolescent. If you didn't-read it now!
This book is fascinating and extremely well written. Adults will probably have the perspective to enjoy it even more than adolescents do. I first read this book when I was 11,and I didn't quite understand it all, but it was still absorbing and fascinating. I reread it many times over the years, each reading feeling more swept away by Deborah's story. Now I'm 43 years old, an M.D., and I still love this book.
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The story of Deborah, a 16-year-old schizophrenic young Jewish girl, is told with amazing insight into the delusions and hallucinations of this type of mental illness. At the same time the "unreality" Deborah experiences is described so creatively, and evocatively, and is so rich and textured, that it is very easy to find yourself falling into "her" vision of the world. This is especially true when her rich fantasies are contrasted with the cold, impersonal and randomly cruel life of the hospital (unfortunately I believe this is a very accurate description of even what was a "good" psychiatric hospital in the 1950's).
-- Deborah's progress closer to "sanity" contains moments of clarity and connection so beautifully described, they can still bring me close to tears.
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If I could recommend only one book in the whole of Amazon.com: this would be the one!
Rating:
Summary: Mind-boggling
Review: Autobiographical & haunting. I've read this more times than I can count; my copy is dog-eared & well-loved. The psychiatric treatment is outdated, but the beauty of the story & the language used to tell it overwhelm uneasiness about how Deborah's condition is handled. The ending of this book makes me cry every time - sad tears for what Deborah gives up. Recommended without reservation.
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Summary: An awesome book
Review: I am only 17 years old, but I love this book. It is so amazing! I read some other reviews on how people read this book when they were around the age of 16 and then again when they were 40 and realized so many new things. I think I will probably do that. I never promised you a rose garden is sad, yet very interesting. I recommend this book to anyone.
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Summary: the BEST book i've ever read
Review: The first time I read this book was an accident. I bought it from a used bookstore when I was ten. all I can say is READ THIS BOOK, it is absolutely amazing. every time I've read it, I've found something new. The author's writing style is unique, with many levels to her story: one being the level of the plot (which was about all I could understand when I was ten), and the rest are something deeper (which I've discovered since then). I Never Promised You A Rose Garden is a great book for those with depression. The book gives great insight into the power of the mind. I wouldn't reccomend this book for anyone who hasn't yet entered high school as it is very complicated and deals with issues that someone younger would have a fairly hard time understanding. Please take my advice and read it.
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Summary: Lovely.
Review: That everyone says "healthy" people can't understand this book almost disturbs me.. I identify very strongly with the main character, though I have never been diagnosed and don't suffer from episodes. In any event, I found the book utterly wonderful and could see it in my mind very clearly. I found myself wanting so badly for everything to come out all right for Deb, for her to be able to feel and see and touch again.. and it made me feel so much more alive. To merely be breathing and seeing things as they are seems so much more precious, even several years after reading this book.... I highly recommend it...
Rating: 
Summary: A Garden Of Thorns
Review: Deborah Blau is a sixteen year-old girl who believes that she is no longer a part of our world. Instead, she is a citizen of Yr, a world ruled by the god Anterrberrae and Lactameon, with a choir known as the Collect and a Censor who keeps her from spilling the secrets of Yr to those in our world. She is sent by her parents and doctors to live at a psychiatric institution, where she will spend the next three years working with a competent psychiatrist, attempting to unravel the secrets and reconstruct the painful past which led her to release her grip on reality. This book is set in the 1940's, so a lot of the methods and treatments used (i.e. the cold sheet "pack) are probably out-dated. It is interesting though, to see psychotherapy at work, and the impact which environment and upbringing played in Deborah's illness. The expectations thrust upon her by her immigrant Polish grandfather, a self-made man; the teasing of classmates due to her Jewish heritage; miscommunications and terror during surgery for a childhood tumor, came together to force her to mistrust and withdraw from the world into a land of her own creation. The book is well-written and seems to be very accurate for its time-period. The glimpse we get into Deborah's world is both genuine and terrifying. However, there is a sparseness about this book which makes it hard to find engrossing. First of all, one feels very distant from the main character, Deborah, herself. All of the secondary characters (the psychiatrist, parents, patients, staff) seem to lack emotion, and the interactions between them are hard to find realistic; none of them seem to be real people. Perhaps this is a deft portrayal of a schizophrenic, but it does not necessarily make for pleasant reading. I also found the psychiatrist's coaching to be a bit errant. While upbringing definitely plays a part in schizophrenia, there is also evidence of an imbalance of the neurotransmitter, dopamine. This was not mentioned in the story. A great deal of Deborah's behavior was not explained. I found myself getting impatient as I reached the half-way point of the book. It seemed two hundred and fifty pages was a bit much to describe Deborah's world. Overall, though, this is a worthy reference depicting the life of a schizophrenic teenager, what caused her illness, and how it is reacted to and changed by those around her.
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Summary: Outstanding and startling
Review: Schizophrenia is a disorder much more bizarre and incomprehensible to the healthy person than depression and other forms of neurosis. Likewise, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Joanne Greenberg's startling story of a sixteen-year-old schizophrenic, is, despite its frilly title, much more intense and baroque than the Bell Jar, Girl Interrupted and most other titles on the bookshelf of novels featuring young women's struggles with mental illness. While the protagonists of the former novels undeniably faced gray, discouraging, slanted views of the world around them, reality for Rose Garden's Deborah Blau is something unrecognizable and alarming. Sometime during her childhood of alienation and physical sickness, the kingdom of Yr somehow developed within her mind. The Yri gods invited Deborah to escape the frustrating dimension of Earth and fly through Yr's wide-open skies, dance through its golden fields and speak its poetic language. As she grew older, Deborah became a captive of her imagination, blacking out; assaulting others and cutting and burning herself upon its whim. As Deborah enters an asylum, Ms. Greenberg masterfully takes readers behind the mask of this compulsively fascinating, deeply disturbed young woman. It may be impossible for a healthy person to completely imagine inner workings of someone like Deborah's mind, but this outstanding, somewhat psychedelic-flavored novel gives a startling, unforgettable speculative glimpse.
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Summary: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
Review: A book about schizophrenia, its symptoms and the psychoanalytical treatment of a patient. To begin with, Deborah, the main character, is manifesting the classical symptoms of the disease in that there is abundant evidence of disturbance of thought and of attention, which is provoked by the elaboration of her private world of Yr. She is depicted as retreating for greater periods of time into Yr, to the extent that delusions and hallucinations become part of her everyday experiences. The more she lives in Yr, the more she is subjected to inner and outer attacks, both from the "citizens" who people that world and from the world of her objective environment.
Throughout the book we can see ideas of reference developing as well as the emerging of paranoia. Oversensitivity leads to inappropriate and excessive emotional reactions, which are eventually followed by momentary and prolonged catatonic behavior patterns. The author has lumped together many of the possible symptoms of a schizophrenic disorder, which characterizes Deborah. In so doing, we are given an over-simplified picture of an extreme psychopathological case. The explanation of the causes of schizophrenia is also limited in that the author lauds the efforts of one therapeut school, that of psychoanalysis. There is no glint of behavior therapy or of the humanistic approach to the disorder. Possible organic pathological reasons underlying Deborah's condition are never mentioned; therefore, we are led to believe that schizophrenia is due solely to unresolved psychological crises in childhood. Although there is noted the use of drugs, there is no allusion to drug therapy as such. Whatever medication presented seems to have a "calming" effect on the patients, but there is no talk of antischizophrenic drugs.
Somatic therapy is used regularly in that patients are put into "pack" (cold wet sheets tightly bound around the entire body in mummy fasion); but no other approach besides the psychoanalytic seems to be in effect, at least not on Ward D (the disturbed ward). The time period in which this case is presented (1930's-1960's) does suggest that psychoanalysis would have been the up-to-date and "in" therapy of the day.
Evidence of family conflicts as being the result of a schizophrenic's presence within the family unit is noted several times by Dr. Fried, Deborah's therapist. The author gives us the impression that Esther, Jacob and Suzy can relax a bit more when Deborah isn't with them. In this sense, the family is shown as reacting to the elder daughter's psychopathological disorder rather than family conflicts being the cause of her illness.
On the whole, this book presents an accurate view of schizophrenia and its symdome. Disturbance of thought and of attention, withdrawal, inappropriate emotions, catatonia and inability to focus in time and space are seen as the symptoms. On the other hand, all physiological pathology, such as biochemical defects and heredity, is lacking, whereas environmental precipitants are often discounted in favor of overriding psychololgical factors. As a result of this one-sided view, which favors the psychoanalytical school, the therapeutic process lacks in wholeness. Dr. Fried helps Devotah interpret life and her environment throughout her therapy in terms of appreciation. The mental institution provides possibilities for decentralization when on Wards A and B by promoting workshop interests, and the social worker encourages educational training by suggesting that Deborah take the high school equivalency test. Yet, this help is "intermediate" and of no longterm value because the "beginning" and "terminal" phases of the therapeutic process are missing, i.e., "beginning" phase: organic pathological investigation; "terminal" phase: guided and supported social integration.
I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN leaves the reader with a sense of hopelessness since Deborah is still committed to the care of a mental institution, albeit now with a high school diploma...
An holistic view of schizophrenia, as of any disorder and/or disease, is essential if its immediate and remote causes are to be discovered and if a cure (or at least adequate social functioning) is to be provided to these patients by science.
Rating:
Summary: What A Great Book
Review: Out of all the books I have read, this is one of the few that I already want to start reading again. The author takes you into the double world of young, confused Deborah. Through Deborah she shows all the little things that are taken for granted in the world by even the lowest class of people. These are simple things such as clear senses and being able to have feelings. This is definitely a book that you have to concentrate hard on and if you decide to read "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" for a school project don't cram the book into one night because there is no way that you will get the emotionally moving feeling from the book that it should give. finally Deborah proves to us all through her struggle that we have the power in ourselves to heal the hurt we feel and the sickness we exhibit.
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