Credit: Maria Koehn.

A Drop in the Ocean is the debut YA novel from Léa Taranto, a Paris-born, Burnaby, B.C.-raised writer, whose Chinese and Jewish heritage infuses this coming-of-age story about mental health with humour and tenderness.

Drawn from Taranto’s own experiences with mental health institutions, A Drop in the Ocean follows 16-year-old Mira Durand, who is hospitalized for obsessive compulsive disorder and other mental health conditions.

The book opens on a weighty note as Mira signs forms to be institutionalized in a secure ward at the Residency Adolescent Treatment Centre due to “noncompliance, severe self-harm and aggression.” The staff have thrown out her belongings due to the possibility of contamination, as her clothing was blood-stained. Mira breaks the rules and runs for the garbage bins to retrieve her journal, but thankfully she doesn’t have to, because her psychiatrist, Dr. Grant, jumps in to help her in an act of kindness she describes as piercing.

Mira knew she wanted to be a writer at the age of four, and while she aspires to write an award-winning fantasy series, she says, “I’m not just journal writing for other people to know what it’s really like — my ‘truth,’ or whatever, as a singular drop in the ocean that is teens in psychiatric care — I’m writing to keep a record of whatever the fuck that truth is.”

The sassy and candid voice of Taranto’s protagonist will endear Mira to many readers, especially teens. Sweets, one of Mira’s friends on the ward, expresses her adoration for Mira’s character in a goodbye letter: “And what makes u the baddest of asses is how much u care. Being nice, giving a shit when life sucks, takes serious lady balls.”

Despite her struggles with OCD, such as the ritual of banging her head against walls, which leads a serious hospitalization, Mira’s character deepens throughout; for example, when she confronts the death of her grandfather, who was “home” to her and whose death encourages her to keep writing “my story of us.”

With nods to the Mean Girls franchise from the noughties and references to rapper Akon, Taranto’s debut is a refreshingly unromanticized portrayal of a teenager’s journey through the mental health system. The novel is filled with a cast of characters equally complex as the winning Mira, but it is her self-expression through writing that is the surefire engine of the book. A Drop in the Ocean is funny, heart-rending, and sassy all at once.