Ned Vizzini’s It’s Kind of a Funny Story hasn’t been released in bookstores yet; it won’t be out until April 1. So how did I acquire a copy, and why review it now? Well, it’s kind of a funny story.

My advisor handed me a large brown envelope with my name on it. While I may breathe, eat, live, and sleep in S-103, I’ve never actually received any mail there. So I opened the envelope and was startled to find something that I as a writer have never seen before… an advance reading copy!

When I read the enclosed letter (which had been sent to high school newspapers around the country), I rolled my eyes a bit. Teen depression is the focal point of the novel, and Vizzini hoped that my reading the book would improve awareness.

I was surprised upon opening the book that this isn’t a “poor, poor, pitiful, me” angle on teen depression. Instead, Vizzini creates an astonishingly human character, Craig Gilner, who suffers from teen depression as a result of the pressure to succeed in his new preparatory school.

In addition to the pre-college pressures facing Craig, his best friend and his girlfriend engage in overtly sexual situations, making Craig feel uncomfortable and even jealous that he’s still single (a position to which many, many teenagers can relate). This burgeoning sexual tension builds to a fever pitch, as all the other surrounding pressures close in on Craig.

One dramatic night, Craig (who’s had trouble eating and sleeping) decides that he’s going to kill himself by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. After calling the suicide hotline, though, Craig accidentally checks himself into a psychiatric hospital, Six North, where he’s kept for a week for evaluation.

The best way to describe Vizzini’s novel is “Cuckoo’s Nest with teenagers.” But where Ken Kesey’s novel focuses on change in the sanitarium, Vizzini explores what makes a teenager depressed and how he finds that life is worth living – a catharsis to which all teens ought to arrive.

The book’s opening isn’t exactly slow-moving, but the book doesn’t really gain steam until Craig checks himself in to Six North. There he meets a cast of characters that even Dashiell Hammett (author of The Maltese Falcon), whose characters were so outlandishly original, would have to acknowledge as over the top. The most outstanding is Muqtada, his roommate in Six North who won’t leave bed unless Craig finds Egyptian music for him.

All of the characters in Six North are fully fleshed out, especially the tortured Noelle, who calls to mind images of Brittany Murphy in the underappreciated Kiefer Sutherland film Freeway; Noelle was put in Six North after being caught taking a pair of scissors to her face. Noelle is the girl, though, whom every guy wants to meet: fun, caring, and interesting.

The book closes on an optimistic note, with Craig feeling top of the world again. When I put down the book, I was smiling: not because it was over, but because I felt that Craig’s secret to happiness – finding splendor in the ordinary – was a secret we all could take to heart.