Bergin was smart and attractive, popular and athletic. So why did she swallow a bottleful of pills?

The Turning Hour explores teen despair, weaving the viewpoints of Bergin, a high school senior, with that of her mother, Leslie, to unravel the mystery of why Bergin, in the middle of her senior year, attempts suicide and then struggles to regain a life she can value. Although a dark subject about our heartbreaking national crisis of 1.3 million teen suicide attempts per year, this novel, in the hands of humorist and NPR "Morning Edition" commentator, Shelley Fraser Mickle, lifts the reader into the realm of knowing how to nurture and protect resilience. Peopled with characters that could live in any one's neighborhood: two husbands struggling to understand themselves and the women they love, an African-American psychiatrist with a secret of her own, a stepbrother who looks at the world with "amazed" grace, two senior citizen geldings who don't know much about horse whispering but understand a little about cussing, and a pig who lives behind an azalea--this is a mesmerizing novel about beating the blues and learning how to take care of one's own life.