Emily Beeson has declared July 16 Tell An Author You Care Day.

I'm getting in on this at the end, with a rather short entry, but I want to participate.

The author I want to thank today is Dia Calhoun.  Ms. Calhoun is the author of The Phoenix Dance, a fantasy novel which captures the essence of Bipolar Disorder by using a fantastical metaphor: The Kingdom of Darkness and the Kingdom of Brilliance.

I don't have bipolar disorder; I do have clinical depression.  I have experienced the Kingdom of Darkness and Ms. Calhoun writes about it in a way that I think makes it much more accessible than any explanation I've been able to give.  I have several friends with bipolar disorder; one of my friends with bipolar disorder killed herself this past March.  The Phoenix Dance helped me to understand what she had gone through, what my friends who are still living with this disease deal with every day, and why it is so important that all of us take our medicine, even if it does make us far too emotionally even and affects our bodies in unpleasant ways.

Tomorrow evening I will write up a full review of The Phoenix Dance, complete with my favorite quotes.

For now I will just say:

Thank you, Dia Calhoun, for writing such a moving book that uses fantasy for its greatest purpose: to expose and make familiar ordinary situations by putting them in extraordinary circumstances.