SOLVED: Girl with Scizophrenia/ Talking Turtle [s]

[Jenna]

I read this book originally around 1988 or 89. It was about a girl in the beginning stages of schizophrenia. I am quite sure it was YA though I don't remember that being a genre at the time. It was a rather small hardcover book with only white background and red letters and images. The most prominent thing I remember is she would encounter a turtle that talked to her. I think when she began getting medicated it went away but I am not sure. I think she may have described its shell as being quilt like??
I need to find this book.

[Holly]

I did a Worldcat & Google search. Sounds like A Pebble in Newcomb's Pond by Marianna Dengler.

I found an old Kirkus Review:

Why is Mara dropping coffee cups, failing off ladders? And why does everyone stare at her, even the turtle in Newcomb's pond? Her boyfriend smells so bad, how can she kiss him? And that bitter taste to the food--her mother must be trying to poison her. When Mara sees Gestapo agents coming downstairs instead of her brother and his friend with tennis rackets, she knows she's crazy--but can't let on, or they'll hospitalize her like those filthy women her mental-health class saw at the asylum. She'll escape. . . the turtle has been calling her to the pond. . . but best friend Amy has given her the name of a doctor, and when she sees him he helps as the regular shrink hasn't, explaining that her schizophrenia is biochemical, and that a special diet and nutritional supplements will fix her up. The story is as one-dimensional as a case study (that being so, one might at least have hoped for more specifics from the doctor), but the style is closer to True Confessions. The subject might have a lurid appeal, on a junk-diet level.

[Jenna]

That is it!!!!! My god thank you so much. I have been tortured by this for years. I had tried Google but must have not been doing the right keywords.

[Holly]

I'm glad you've finally found it! I did a Worldcat search first and then a Google search. Luckily there weren't too many juvenile fiction books about schizophrenia back then, haha.