By Cindy Baldwin
Della finds her mother digging the seeds out of a watermelon at two in the morning and talking to people who aren't there, and knows the illness that took her away four years ago has come back.
It's a hot summer on a North Carolina watermelon farm and the crop is failing and Della Kelly, who is twelve, wakes up to find her mama at the kitchen table in the middle of the night, gouging the black seeds out of a watermelon and putting them in a jar, because the crows put them there. Della knows what this is. Her mama went into hospital with it once before, when Della was little, and Della has spent four years believing it was over. So Della decides to fix it herself. She goes to the Bee Lady, who sells honey that everyone in town swears will mend what's broken in you, and she starts doing the mothering, minding her sixteen-month-old sister, keeping the house going, keeping it quiet. And her mama gets worse anyway.
This is the honest one about a parent whose illness doesn't have a tidy shape, and it's the only book on the shelf that names schizophrenia. Cindy Baldwin writes the specific things: not sadness, but a mother talking to people who aren't in the room, and a daughter learning to read the signs before anyone else does. It's for the watchful one, the child running a permanent low-level assessment of whether today is a good day. Della's arc is the thing worth the price of it. She spends the book trying to cure her mother and ends it having understood that her mother isn't a thing to be cured, that loving her and fixing her were never the same job, and that this is going to be part of their family for good.