‘The splatter of ink was minuscule, like a spray of fairy blood. The man wielding the pen blotted it, carefully, before continuing to write: Schizophrenia.’

Rowan the Strange is about Rowan, a young boy living in a blitzed London. Unfortunately he often has fits, when he gets paranoid over the smallest details. One day, when he breaks his sister’s finger in a piano lid, his family decide whether it would be better for him to go to a lunatic asylum.

The story follows Rowan as he tries to come to terms with who he really is and whether he can really ever be normal again. Rowan the Strange depicts some of the true treatments in lunatic asylums during wartime Britain and how people reacted at the time.

I liked Rowan the Strange because of its accessible characters, even though most of them are patients, and the way important moral issues from the time are approached; issues such as having a German as Rowan’s doctor and head of electroconvulsive therapy. Electroconvulsive therapy is the form of treatment used on Rowan; large shocks are administered to the brain through electrodes placed on the head of the patient. This controversial treatment was popular during the wartime period and Doctor Von Metzer (Rowan’s doctor) happens to be the world’s leading expert at that point in time.

However at the end of the book, when Von Metzer decides to take some of them out on a trip to see The Wizard of Oz, they all discover that they seem to be coincidentally identical to the characters from the play: Dorothy corresponds to Dorothea; the cowardly lion to Sid, the cowardly schizophrenic who thinks he is the King of England (the lion being king of the jungle); the tin man relating to John Wallace, a manic depressive who seems not to feel many emotions, and a Professor who has lost the use of his brilliant mind, correlates to the scarecrow. I really don’t like the way Julie Hearn makes this connection so obvious and not subtly at all, that moment almost ruined the book for me so I will give it 6/10.