About The Suicide Year

Written by Lena Prodan

Print Information:
192 pages / 47000 words / 5x8 trade paperback
ISBN: 978-1-60370-557-8, 1-60370-557-0

eBook Information:
125 pages / 47000 words
Available file types - html, lit, pdf, prc
ISBN: 978-1-60370-583-7, 1-60370-583-X

Genre: Contemporary

Age Range: 16 and up.

Being a military kid isn’t easy. Every year might mean a new school and new friends. But staying in one place is just as hard when a girl doesn’t even fit in with the outcasts. How many secrets can she hold inside, especially when they’re tearing her apart? A crush on a girl at school, bouts of depression, suicide attempts, and fear of life beyond high school are enough to push her to the edge.

The one person she trusts with her secrets abandons her when she desperately needs a friend. Her lifelong dream of hiking the Appalachian Trail is yanked out of her grasp just before it comes to pass. The girl she likes hooks up with a boy. Her father blames her for her mother’s mental illness. And she’s afraid she’ll be outed to her parents. Desperate to escape, she plans the perfect fail-proof suicide, ready to leave all of her problems behind. But as she’s going through the ritual, she finds a savior in herself. 

Sample

“Hanging yourself is a lot harder than it seems.”

Is it?” Eric murmured.
    
“It is. Rope. Chair. Neck. Basic, right? Almost Zen in simplicity—”
    
“What do you know about Zen?” he asked.
    
“I read shit. But like I said, deceptively simple in theory, but in execution?”
    
“Execution. Hah.” Eric laughed like someone punched his gut.
    
Thunderstorms the night before had made the July air muggier than usual. Even the shade under the dark wood gazebo roof was suffocating. Eric and I lay on top of one of the picnic tables which were bolted to the concrete foundation with heavy chains, as if someone might try to carry it away.
    
While we waited for the acid to kick in, we stared out at the thick woods that surrounded the gazebo. If anyone came down the narrow trail, we’d hear them long before they saw us. It was the perfect place to hide from the Military Police and get stoned.
    
I sat up, putting my feet on the bench near the dog. She perked up, her tiny white ears erect, but closed her eyes again when she saw I wasn’t going anywhere. “The thing that pisses me off is that other kids die all the time from the stupidest things, but MENSA girl here somehow couldn’t manage it.”
    
“Hmm.” His long fingers rested on his deeply tanned stomach above a swirled patch of hair so blond it was white. 
    
On the far side of the trees, a lawnmower droned. I could smell the cut grass. My eyes stung.
    
“Apparently, the job of hangman involves a lot more than blatant disregard for the sanctity of human life and a Henry Ford ‘any color, as long as it’s black’ approach to fashion. There are variables. Distance and velocity of drop, position of the knot, type of rope, weight of the subject…”
    
“Now that you mention it, yeah. I can see that,” Eric said.
    
“Stuff I never thought to take into account. Math stuff.”
    
“There you go.” He flicked away a sweat bee that hovered over his nose.

I flopped back onto the picnic table and stared at the underside of the gazebo roof. “Math. It figures, right? There are formulas. Did you know that? I can’t find them anywhere, of course, but those hangmen had mathematical formulas to calculate it all out.”
    
“Even if you had the formulas—.”
    
“Shut up.”