Book Recommendation

What It Takes To Pull Me Through was written by David L. Marcus and published by Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005. This was an inspiring book about the lives of teens, four in particular, who are committed to a fourteen-month program for troubled youth. Marcus guides us through their treatment and turmoil from within their group. Marcus tells us profound secrets of teens balancing on the edge between life and death. These teens have experienced events that steal childhood and force adult issues on children. Drugs, pregnancy, rape, overwhelming depression, mental disorders, eating disorders, sexual encounters, parental death, and teens out of control are some of the issues brought to light. Marcus guides us to feel the pain and the triumph of each teen. We yearn for them to succeed and we feel their anguish as our own when they experience a set-back.

In my personal opinion this is a heart wrenching story of kids gone wrong. It displays not only what can happen in the shadow of inner-cities, but also in the wealthiest suburbs where children are given every advantage. I would recommend What It Takes to Pull Me Through to every parent, especially those who believe tragedy only happens to other families, parents who think they know their children, parents who "“know", without a doubt, that their children always will come to them with every problem: this book is for them. This book illustrates what every parent fears most, the loss of a child. A loss, not to a tragic car accident, but to the slow and painful self-destruction of a teenager at the precipice of life and death; a childhood that never will be fulfilled due to over-indulgence by a consumer society that teaches money can buy happiness.