Rose Garden begins with Esther and Jacob Blau making the difficult decision to institutionalize their teenage daughter after a suicide attempt. Penguin Random House’s decision to release a new edition under the Penguin Classics imprint, complete with a forward by author Esmé Weijun Wang ( The Border of Paradise, The Collected Schizophrenias) and a new afterword by Greenberg herself, provides a framework for more complex understandings of the novel - especially when it comes to its portrayal of mental health issues and Jewishness - making this classic novel available to new generations of readers. Greenberg (whose novel The King’s Person’s won the Jewish Book Council’s National Jewish Book Award in 1964) was admitted to a mental health hospital at sixteen years old Rose Garden is a fictionalization of the years she spent as a patient there. Joanne Greenberg’s novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, first published in 1964 under the pen name Hannah Green, is a semi-autobiographical account of a teen’s struggle with schizophrenia.
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