Book Review: Exploring Mental Health and Acceptance in Nicole Melleby’s Hurricane Season

Hurricane season is a time of uncertainty. The months can pass by without any fanfare at all. Or the winds and storms can hit land and do their damage. For twelve-year-old Fig in Nicole Melleby’s Hurricane Season, this unpredictability becomes the pattern of her days. She never knows when the storm within her father’s mind and heart will change course and make landfall.

Counting down the days on a calendar, Fig waits for the end of hurricane season, which coincides with CP&P’s decision about whether or not her father is fit to parent. It’s a question that Fig doesn’t want to ask. She stubbornly believes that her father, a musician, who always professes “double” the sentiment in his I love yous, is, simply, misunderstood.

Despite her love for math and science and its concrete predictability, Fig decides to turn to art to better understand her father’s erratic behavior. At first, she’s drawn to Van Gogh’s paintings for their bright colors and swirls, but, later, she comes to discover that Van Gogh, like her Dad, also suffers from bi-polar disorder. As she learns more about his life, she can’t help but find similarities in Van Gogh’s relationship with his brother, Theo, who took care of his brother in his darkest times.

But, like a shift in weather patterns, Fig’s father begins seeking treatment. Their new neighbor, Mark, takes on the role of caretaker and, gradually, something more in her father’s life. And Fig finds herself unmoored; questioning the pull to the storm growing in her own mind, as she tries to figure out where and how she fits into this new paradigm.

Melleby’s colorful and swirling prose give this novel a dreamlike quality. It echoes the ebb and flow of music and the ocean, the two backdrops in Fig’s life. The first comes in the feverish, unfinished songs her father tries to compose and the second in the one place that teems with the possibility of the tempest she is, both, drawn to and fears.

A realistic and sensitive portrayal of mental health, Hurricane Season is about acceptance. Gradually, Fig and her father learn to accept help, from one another and from friends, teachers, and professionals. They also come to accept that good and bad can come in tandem and that their ability to weather life’s inevitable storms will grow stronger with each season.

Hurricane Season is on B&N bookshelves now.