Where did we get the idea that families are durable? Christmas cards? Prime time TV? Katharine Noel's sure-footed debut, "Halfway House," tells the darker truth: most families — the ordinary ones, the sturdy-looking ones — are tinderboxes. Spark them and they blow.

A spark of calamity comes to the Voorster family at a high school swim meet. Seventeen-year-old Angie has just routed the competition in the individual medley, and she's acting strangely, babbling to her teammates at the pool's edge. Her parents, Jordana and Pieter, wonder if she's on drugs — or maybe the pressure of college applications has gotten to her. Then, during her younger brother's race, Angie throws herself into the pool, swims to the bottom and stays there.

Angie has had a psychotic break, and it's a sign of Noel's intelligence and steady instincts as a storyteller that this throat-grabber of a scene doesn't pack in sedatives, a straitjacket or men in white suits dragging her to the hospital. Rather, we cut ahead three months. Angie is now a resident at a clinic in upstate New York, dosed on lithium and terrified of an impending visit from her best friend. The novel will leap again, spanning months, even years between chapters, charting the terrible endurance of Angie's illness, the long, uncertain span of her recovery.

Meanwhile, Angie's family has its own recovery to live through. In the aftermath of the break, Jordana begins an affair, carelessly, which Pieter soon discovers. The marriage crumbles, but Noel pins neither Jordana nor Pieter as the villain, showing — convincingly — their longing for each other even as bitterness mounts. Pieter is especially affecting, finding comfort wherever he can — ice skating, playing his cello, even snorting cocaine.

Noel's also good — a little too good — on Angie's brother, Luke. At the start of the novel he's a teenager and by the end he's reached his early 20's — not a man's most self-aware years. True to form, Luke can be impulsive, even thoughtless. He's devoted to his sister but is also sort of a brute, hitting her in the face when she turns manic in his car. Later, he'll throw the phone, kick the kitchen cabinet and pressure his girlfriend to skip her sister's wedding. Luke is wounded by his sister's illness, but it's a bit wearying to watch him cope so reflexively, with so much boyish angst.

Angst would be a luxury for Angie, requiring a steadiness of mind she can't muster. Over six years of mania and depression, checking in and out of hospitals and a halfway house, sampling 19 different combinations of medication, she remains the strongest, most immediate presence in the novel. Noel writes Angie's manic episodes with a harrowing immediacy, but even better, she captures the fragility of her saner moments. Despite the novel's sort-of-happy ending, what remains is Angie's loss, the distance she's fallen from a promising, college-bound teenager to a vulnerable young woman, afraid of her mind's strange, tidal rhythms: "Always, she prodded herself gingerly, like touching a bruise or a cavity. Did her restlessness mean her meds weren't working? . . . A faint dread always moved in her like a steel rasp, but if she kept busy enough she didn't have to pay attention to it."

PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY—A New Hampshire family comes apart at the seams when Angie Voorster, an ostensibly perfect high school senior and swim team star falls off the edge of mental stability. Among those affected are Pieter, Angie's emotionally inarticulate father; her mother, Jordana, 15 years Pieter's junior and seeking solace in the arms of a younger man; and Angie's younger brother, Luke, who becomes his sister's keeper. Debut novelist Noel brings these characters to life, exposing every blemish and desire, and revealing them in all their messy humanness. Over the next several years, bipolar Angie struggles to adjust to life derailed by mental illness, ever-changing prescriptions and their side effects: "She couldn't even lay claim to her own thoughts. Was she the thoughts she had on meds, when her brain was as it should be? Or was she the thoughts she had off meds, her brain as it really was?" Noel unflinchingly constructs scenes with a cinematographer's eye and injects humor into a world of chronic insomnia and suicide attempts. She resists sensationalizing or romanticizing mental illness, and with sympathetic knowledge of the subject (she worked at a mental health home), her keen insights are spot-on. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

BOSTON GLOBE—Katharine Noel's arresting debut novel, a sharp but ethereal chronicle of a New Hampshire family's struggle with mental illness, is an eloquent literary performance in part because it is not centered on the spectacle of 17-year-old Angie Voorster's psychosis or on the potentially mawkish details of her decline from a straight A, Yale-bound champion swimmer to a lithium-bloated body, lying confused and alone in the bed of a homeless shelter. ``Halfway House" is a richly imagined and deeply felt portrait of four people and the life they lead as a family and as human beings who yearn for connection. What Pieter and Jordana Voorster and their two children, Angie and Luke, have in common, more than a heightened sense of the precariousness of ordinary life, is a penetrating awareness of the loneliness encroaching on them from the empty spaces just beyond their reach.

 Pieter Voorster, the gentle patriarch, is a concert cellist who feels the ``weird hollowness of loss" in the opportunities swept away by the relentless cycle of time passing. Just as Angie understands her world through water, the ``unreal blue" of the swimming pool that, in her first full psychotic break, called her deep down into the water, Pieter translates his environment into waves of sound: ``If his wife's voice was a cello, his daughter's was usually the lowest, most open notes of the flute." But Jordana gives these sounds and the broader existential canvas of which they are a part their real meaning. Noel lingers over the weight of Pieter's utter dependence on Jordana, the way he relies on his wife to help him ``interpret the world" and, more important, to interpret himself. ``Jordana carried his identity more than he did," and it is for this reason that Jordana's affair is such a crushing blow. Pieter's natural reserve, the way he seems to others ``unreadable and self-contained," is shaken by his daughter's illness. But his primary preoccupations are his failed relationship with Jordana and his inability to realize the youthful passion and artistic promise of his life. After Jordana's infidelity is exposed, this sense of failure drives his downward spiral. Skating for miles on a frozen New England river, focusing on the controlled movements of his body rather than the uncontrollable trajectory of his life, he wonders, ``How had he come to be so alone?"

Katharine Noel's first novel, HALFWAY HOUSE, follows the Voorster family in the years after Angie's breakdown and subsequent bipolar disorder diagnoses.

With the incident in the pool, Angie and her family --- her younger brother Luke and parents Pieter and Jordana --- set out on the long road of trying to understand Angie's disorder, stabilize it and cope with it. Of course, it is toughest for Angie. She misses a year of school and graduates late. She is heavily medicated and still swings between mania and suicidal depressions. She lives in a series of hospitals and facilities apart from her family.

But each family member is challenged by her illness. Angie's condition begins to pull apart her parents' relationship. Pieter, a professional cellist, becomes withdrawn and introspective. Jordana, who had been having an affair, feels exposed, guilty and needy. They struggle to keep their marriage intact.

Luke, less ambitious and successful than his sister in their adolescence, flies under his parents' radar, practically living with his high school girlfriend before eventually going away to college and falling in love with a mild-mannered student who is the opposite of his sister in many ways. This college girlfriend, Wendy, feels that Luke is more committed to his sister than to her --- and in many ways she is right. After years of dealing with Angie's unpredictability and emotional and physical needs, Luke is centered on his sister.

And as Angie grows into adulthood she feels it necessary to assert her independence from the family that, of late, has defined themselves by her illness.

Noel's prose is lovely; poetic yet realistic and very readable. She portrays her characters with honesty and intelligence, allowing them flaws and a gritty humanity while keeping them likable.

Angie's manic and depressive episodes are stunningly written. Both extremes feel claustrophobic and intense for the reader. Noel's descriptions of Angie's thoughts and actions are unflinching and often uncomfortable. But this is also what makes the novel unique and stunning.

HALFWAY HOUSE is about a family once ideal but now surviving the best way it can in a difficult and highly charged situation. Noel lets the Voorsters each respond to the crises in their own way, never allowing the reader to forget that this is Angie's story.

In Angie Voorster, Noel has created a memorable character, one who is warm and amazing, strong and sometimes frightening. While it is mostly Angie's story, Noel's novel is also about the dynamics between Luke and Angie, and how they depend on each other.

HALFWAY HOUSE is a very intense and enjoyable debut from a young novelist with promise and talent.

LIBRARY JOURNAL—When a psychotic breakdown sends 17-year-old Angie Voorster diving into a New Hampshire swimming pool and disrupts her younger brother Luke's 100-meter freestyle race, the entire Voorster family is plunged along with her into years of medications, hospitalizations, and turmoil. Angie's battle with mental illness amplifies her family's growing isolation from one another as Luke first retreats from and then becomes so involved in his sister's recovery that he jeopardizes his own collegiate future. Mom and Dad-women's clinic administrator Jordana and Dutch-born cellist Pieter-unite to help their daughter but are tested by stress and infidelity. From the 1980s into the 1990s, Noel's stunning debut novel moves us through painfully believable human relationships tested, repaired, and transformed by time and experience. Close attention is paid to supporting characters-lovers and friends-and the New England setting is apt for such brittle and golden themes. This is suburban angst in the tradition of John Cheever and Rick Moody, told with a rare and honest sympathy that rings true by an author to watch. Recommended for all library fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/05.]-Jenn B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll.-Northeast Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

KIRKUS REVIEWS— A New Hampshire family is transformed by mental illness in Noel's first novel. Angie Voorster is a straight-A student and a star athlete; at 17, she can take her pick of Ivy League schools. After a manic outburst at a swim meet, though, her future takes on a different trajectory. Angie's mental illness doesn't destroy her family, but it puts excessive pressure on it. Noel is very good with the everyday and particularly sensitive to the material world. The semi-functional appliances in the Voorster home-the CD player that needs to be propped up on one side with magazines, the refrigerator with the useless thermostat-speak eloquently of the family's semi-functional state. Phenomena as quotidian as a corrugated cardboard box or the smell of cold, wet earth become powerful conduits for emotion and memory. These moments give the narrative texture, and they allow the author to reveal her characters' inner lives and histories at a measured pace. Just as the Voorsters adapt themselves to the strange, new Angie, the universe of the everyday also shifts to accommodate her illness. As Angie moves through hospitals and outpatient centers, the author depicts places where madness is contained with rules and bureaucracy. Noel's representation of mental illness is sympathetic, but never romantic. The sicker Angie becomes, the smaller and more exhausting her world seems, her disease circumscribing her relatives' lives. Noel's handling of mental illness is compassionate and clear-eyed, but her tale is about more than Angie's disorder. It explores the mystery of family and its inexplicable, irresistible resilience in the face of affliction-whether mental illness, addiction, a disease of the body or someother pathology too subtle and rare to have a name. Graceful and quietly assured.

FROM AMAZON—Halfway House, Katharine Noel's triumphant debut, does far more than expose the highs and lows of battling mental illness; rather, it leaves readers with a sense of longing that transcends the subject matter. Told from the perspective of five family members, Noel expertly captures each character's essence with unapologetic honesty, creating sympathies that would falter under a less gifted writer. The result is a profound look at how a crisis can both destroy and reinvent a seemingly typical family.

Set in rural New Hampshire, Halfway House tells the story of the Voorster family, whose lives are upended when 17-year-old Angie suffers a breakdown and is eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. As Angie shuffles between hospitals, dorm rooms, halfway houses, and her childhood home, the side effects of her disease and treatment impact each member of her family. Her father Pieter, a Dutch-born cellist, retreats into himself, while her mother Jordana begins an affair. Angie's brother Luke finds comfort in his girlfriends, especially Wendy, whom he meets while at college in Wisconsin. Eventually, familial relationships must be broken in order to be reinvented. In the process, family dynamics must shift, and each character must confront their own demons in order to emerge on the other side.

From One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to Girl, Interrupted, the subject of mental illness is hardly uncharted in modern literature. What Noel does is go beyond the disease to explore the consequences of crisis, both punishing and redemptive, without compromise or excuses. That is what makes Halfway House a wonder, and a pleasure to behold.
—Gisele Toueg

FROM THE TRIBUNE – Don’t let the title of Katharine Noel’s debut scare you. “Halfway House” does deal with the issue of mental illness in a no-holds-barred manner. But it’s also a compassionate and compelling look at how a family copes when one member slides into a cycle of manic depression.

   Pieter and Jordana Voorster have always been proud of their daughter, Angie. Now a senior in high school, she’s an all-star swimmer, a good student and a dutiful daughter to her parents. But one day there’s a frightening incident at a swim meet, and from then on nothing in the Voorster household is ever the same.

   In the years that follow, Angie moves from hospitals to halfway houses, back home and then on to college. Her illness recurs, and the rotation begins once again.

   Noel’s depiction of Angie’s depression is frightening in its accuracy. She captures the exhilarating ecstasy of mania and the unspeakable paralysis of the emotional sinkhole that follows it. This is an author who understands that whether it’s called manic depression or bipolar disorder, the illness is fickle and tough to manage.

   As Angie battles not only her disease but a loss of self-worth, her family members manage in different ways. Pieter, a professional musician, retreats into his music and frustrating memories of life before his daughter’s break. “All he ever wanted was a life that had coherence and a little grace,” Noel writes.

   Angie’s mother begins an affair with a younger man, more out of anger and a sense of loss than any real affection or lust. Jordana is the lone Voorster who acknowledges her sadness and fear, but only to herself.

   “She could be knocked off balance at any moment. It could be something obvious, like Angie crying, or it could be something more oblique, like a girl begging change downtown. … It was as though, between happiness and unhappiness, she’d discovered a trapdoor she’d never known was there, one she couldn’t close.”

   Surprisingly, it’s Angie’s younger brother and only sibling, Luke, who best weathers the change in the family dynamics. He moves from a sullen, resentful teenager at the time of Angie’s diagnosis to becoming her most patient and fierce champion.

   Free from the more complex parent-child connection, Luke’s alliance with his sister is genuine in its regard for her well-being and the acknowledgment that Angie will never be the same.

   But this understanding comes at a price. As he moves on to college and falls in love with Wendy, a quiet, self-possessed young woman the emotional opposite of his sister, Luke risks sacrificing one relationship for the other. Caught between what he wants to do and what he feels is his duty, he risks a life in no-man’s land where hard decisions are ignored or put off until tomorrow.

   In the end, it’s Angie who saves herself. Her journey through the capricious minefield of her illness is heartbreaking and frustrating for both reader and character. Noel doesn’t sugarcoat her story but neither does she paint a portrait of defeat and never-ending sadness.

   Some of the book’s best moments come when Angie manages to conquer her illness and startle her family out of their tendencies to handle her like cut glass. At the end of one hospital stay, the three of them nervously arrive to take her home.

   “Angie re-emerged from her room and Luke jumped forward to take her bag. As he took it, he pretended the weight was making him stagger. ‘What’s in here?’

   ‘I’m smuggling out another patient.’”