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.

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