Willow is a book about self-injury, cutting, but it’s also about how something like cutting doesn’t really define a person. Willow, the heroine of the book, is much more than just a cutter. She’s a beautiful girl, who blushes easily. She’s an imaginative girl who loves Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. She’s capable of sacrificially someone else, even though she’s in such pain herself that it is all she can do to survive each day, sometimes hour by hour, even minute by minute.

On a rainy March night, Willow’s parent asked her to drive them home after they had a little too much wine at dinner. Willow tried, but she lost control of the car in the driving rain, and her parents, both of them, died in the ensuing accident. Willow survived, but her pain was too much to bear. So she began cutting to relieve the pain. The principle is that physical pain cancels out emotional pain, and Willow doesn’t know how to stop.

Enter Guy (yes, his name is Guy). Guy accidentally finds out Willow’s secret, and he considers himself responsible for Willow after she convinces him that telling her older brother/guardian about the cutting would destroy him. Slowly, Willow and Guy begin to trust one another, and then fall in love in spite of the barrier stands between them—Willow’s inability to allow herself to feel and her love-hate relationship with self-injury.

The book mostly eschews easy answers (just quit! why hurt yourself like that?) and goes for the power of love and patience to heal all wounds, even deep trauma like Willow’s. I was quite impressed with the author’s ability to get inside the head of deeply hurting seventeen year old like Willow and find not only the emotional pain hidden there, but also the personality and strength that it takes to overcome that pain and live through it. This book would be an excellent read for teens dealing with this issue in their own life or in that of a friend or relative.

Unfortunately, the author felt it necessary to have the teen couple in the book engage in premarital sex, an act that brings healing in the book, but that I think would be more confusing and unsettling to a teen who’s already dealing with serious emotional problems. I’m also not sure that telling teens that all it takes to overcome a serious addiction like cutting is the persistent love of a good man is quite the right message. Even though the patience part is emphasized, it still comes across as redemption by true love within 300 pages.

Some other resources for reading about and coping with self-injury and depression:

To Write Love on Her Arms is a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide. TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire and also to invest directly into treatment and recovery.

Blade Silver: Color Me Scarred by Melody Carlson.