13-year old Winnie
May lives a comfortable and happy life in Chicago with her parents, medical
Doctor Maxwell and stay-at-home mother Colleen. She belongs to the French Club
("tres chic") and spends
time at her parent’s country club with her friends the Starlings — short for
‘darling little stars’. But Winnie’s parents make a sudden and inexplicable
decision to move to a town in rural Minnesota, and worse still, her father’s
new job involves the whole family living in the grounds of the Bridgewater
State Hospital — a mental institution.

It is 1959. The
Bridgewater State Hospital is a rambling complex of buildings and gardens set
above a network of underground tunnels which assist in the transportation of
people and provisions during the Minnesota winter. The only thing creepier than
the hospital and its inmates, for Winnie, is the fact of the family being there
at all.

Winnie, at 13, is
likely to be questioning her life, her friendships and the authority and
omniscience of her parents. By transporting her to a life so challenging and
different, and bringing her into contact with a variety of characters including
the mentally ill at the Bridgewater hospital, the country children in her class
and her new friend Justin from the Indian reservation (he’s an outsider, just
as Winnie herself is now an outsider — what a change from her previous
friendships!) Johnson effectively adds drama and tension to her depiction of
Winnie at this fascinating stage of life.

As the mystery of
why the family is at Bridgewater State at all starts to unravel, Winnie’s
mother suffers a mental crisis of her own and leaves the hospital to
recuperate, throwing Winnie even further onto her own resources and into a
closer and more complex relationship with her father.

I found Worlds
Apart and enjoyable and insightful look into the life of a displaced 1950s
teenager, with the references to methods of housing and treating the mentally
ill in the 50s not deeply explored, but touched on and adding interest. The
solution to the mystery mentioned above — which I won’t give away — adds a
further element of historical/political interest. These were (and still are)
"interesting times" for science and medicine in Western democracies.

©
2005 Aislinn Batstone

Aislinn Batstone is a Ph.D. candidate
at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her research interests include metaphysics,
philosophy of logic, and the philosophy of neurobiology and mental illness.

Categories: Children