Matthew Unstrung - Hardcover

Seago, Kate

3.62

8 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803722303 ISBN 13: 9780803722309

Publisher: Dial, 1998

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Matthew's father does not want him to help run his brother's ranch but rather complete his education and become a minister, but Matthew wants to follow his heart and knows he must take a stand against the wishes of his father in order to do so.

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Review:

If you stretch a rubber band far enough, it will break--pure and simple. Matthew feels as if his life is at that breaking point. No matter how many hours he spends bent over books for his classes at the conservative religious school to which his father has sent him, concepts and words blur in his mind, causing him to fail exam after exam. He's flunking out, but that's the least of his worries. What will happen when his father, a preacher of the fire-and-brimstone variety, finds out? Imagine the worst: Matthew becomes completely unstrung from the overwhelming stress of his father's expectations. During a frightening emotional breakdown, school officials cart Matthew off to a local mental institution even before his father arrives to claim him. What happens to Matthew next makes for one of the most moving stories ever written about a teen trying to find his own way after disappointing a parent. Broken, snapped like a rubber band, unable to talk, unable to care for himself, Matthew is rescued by his brother Zach--a black sheep if ever there was one--and taken to a Colorado ranch for healing. But does Zach have what it takes to bring his brother back to life? Matthew and Zach's story will challenge and warm the hearts of any teen who has felt the pressure of having to live up to a dream that was never his or her own.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A harrowing, if roughly constructed debut, based on the experiences of the author's grandfather; this tale of a student with a learning disability who is driven into a nervous breakdown is set in the early years of this century, when treatment of insanity was still firmly fixed in the Dark Ages. Although Matthew studies to the point of exhaustion, he is frustrated by an inability to understand or retain what he reads; when his failing marks get him expelled from the college in which he's enrolled, he breaks down, withdrawing into catatonia. He is committed to a private asylum, where a horrific program of abuse and neglect drives him even further into himself. Rescued at last by his older brother Zack, who takes him to a ranch in Colorado, Matthew finally embarks on the road to physical and mental health. Sharply defined are Matthew's rage and frustration at the beginning, and his painful, tentative steps toward recovery at the end are sharply defined; in between, readers get only glimpses of his interior state, perhaps because Seago switches points of view among several characters, sometimes rapidly. Matthew's mother and others are introduced with plot-stopping digressions, and the story loses focus with the development of a romance between Zack and a young woman. Still, Matthew's character is well-realized enough to make his retreat into mental illness seem plausible, given the pressures placed on him--and his experience in the asylum is positively nightmarish. Uneven but often engrossing. (Fiction. 11-15) -- Copyright �1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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