Mental A Novel

“But all of the chartreuse buds on the new spring branches are also the brown crispy leaves that blow to the ground in the fall. It’s natural. It’s the way life works.” – Chapter 16, “Mental” This novel is about Eve Stuart, a 22 year old English teacher who is having a nervous breakdown. Her twin sister, Lily, is secretly writing a novella for a college class, trying to figure out what is wrong with Eve: so she graduated from college too early, so she has quit what is probably the most stressful job you can get right out of college, so she cheated on her first grownup boyfriend, so what? writes Lilly, in the first section of “Mental”…Part Two is a flashback to what Eve was like when she was still in college and where Eve has a pivotal interaction with one of three homeless drifters in the novel, a woman named Gloria, who is the first person to challenge Eve’s naivete…The last part of “Mental” is told by Eve herself, written the night before Lilly’s novella is due, snuck into the pages as a response to the novella that Eve has known about all along, a first person account of having a nervous breakdown where Eve reveals the dark family secret lying behind her depression and then details how she will overcome her past and embark upon the uncertain life of a writer.This story unfolds much like a mystery and is a tale of the heart and the head and the difficulties of getting the two to work in concert after damages have been done. Although the subject matter may at times be dark, it has a hard won happy ending and an overwhelmingly positive view of the human spirit. This novel is about changes and transitions and is meant to inspire those who are struggling to find themselves in a world that can be full of evil, disappointment, loss and grief to continue to search for peace even in the midst of suffering. This is Johnston’s second novel. Her first novel, “Leaves Subsiding (2010),” written under pen name M Yoshida McCurry, is about the elusive search for happiness. She is also the author of “Dandelions (2019),” a long poem, “Disaster and Harmony: A Poetry Collection (2019),” and Cosmogony (2019),” a rhyming and metered poem about the natural world and one girl’s place in it. Marie K Johnston (aka Kristen M McCurry) is a novelist, poet, visual artist and website creator. You can learn more about her life and art at https: //www.MarieKJohnston.com. She is a 43 year old married mother of one living in a little arty town just northeast of Houston, TX, where she writes for a variety of publications.