With its attractive cover and a title that will appeal to almost any teen, My Crazy Life is off to a good start. Adolescents love to read about real teens, and this book is a step above the Chicken Soup genre, in that it deals with more complex issues and offers fewer pat answers.

Compiled by Toronto youth mental health workers Allen Flaming and Kate Scowan, this book is a series of first-person narratives by 10 teens (six of them female) who have gone through a variety of adverse situations and survived to tell the tale and give some advice. Names and locations have been changed for privacy reasons but since most of the venues are American, the publisher may have sacrificed some resonance with Canadian kids to gain greater appeal in the U.S. Either directly or through their parents, these kids have experienced alcohol and substance abuse, mental illness, violence (both as victims and perpetrators), the death of a parent, coming out, divorce, homelessness, and immigration. The stories illustrate how horribly parents, other relatives, and peers sometimes treat kids. Redemption most often comes from a person who takes the time to care, such as a friend who locked one narrator in his bedroom for three days to get him off PCP.

A short introductory synopsis of each story detracts from the first-person feel and takes away any element of surprise or suspense. The interviews have been edited in such a way that there’s a certain sameness to them, but neither of these complaints constitutes a fatal flaw.