From the author of Incredible Space Raiders from Space! comes a brand-new coming-of-age story about a boy whose life revolves around hiding his obsessive compulsive disorder-until he gets a mysterious note that changes everything.

“It’s the vivid, insightful depiction of Sara’s internal struggles that readers will remember.” —Booklist In this prequel to the Edgar Award–winning OCDaniel, fan-favorite Sara quests for “normal” and finds something even better along the way. Sara’s Rules to Be Normal 1. Stop taking your pills 19. Make a friend 137. Don’t put mayonnaise on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Sara wants one thing: to be normal. What she has instead are multiple diagnoses from Dr. Ring. Sara’s constant battle with False Alarm—what she calls panic attacks—and other episodes cause her to isolate herself. She rarely speaks, especially not at school, and so she doesn’t have any friends. But when she starts group therapy she meets someone new. Talkative and outgoing Erin doesn’t believe in “normal,” and Sara finds herself in unfamiliar territory: at the movies, at a birthday party, and with someone to tell about her crush—in short, with a friend. But there’s more to Erin than her cheerful exterior, and Sara begins to wonder if helping Erin will mean sacrificing their friendship.

Fostering Mental Health Literacy through Adolescent Literature provides educators a starting point for engaging students in the study of adolescent literature that features mental health themes with the intended goal of developing students’ mental health literacy while simultaneously attending to English Language Arts content and literacy standards. Each chapter, co-authored by a literacy expert and mental health specialist, features a specific adolescent novel and provides middle and high school teachers background information on the novel’s featured mental health theme(s), along with pedagogical approaches for guiding readers into, through, and out of the novel. In doing so, this text seeks to raise awareness of mental health issues thereby reducing associated stigma and normalizing individual and peer mental health experiences for all adolescents.