SOLVED. YA/Middle grade (~1990): kid hallucinates island, takes a bottle of pills, goes to therapy... I don't recall the rest. [s]

[SMH]

I read this book around 1990 and it was almost certainly published around that time, but might have been a first publication in English.

The book is about a kid (a girl, I think) who is a good artist. The family has a pond in the yard with a little island. While walking to a sibling's event (hockey game maybe), the main character has a vision of the island. She returns to reality far from home and hitchhikes back to familiar turf. She goes into the house - I think there was a party going on - and downs a bottle of pills. The rest of the book has her in therapy, taking her drawing lessons, etc. I don't recall how it concluded.

The only other part I DO recall specifically is that she promised a younger kid (her drawing/art tutor's kid) one of her drawings and the kid picked a sketch she had done absent-mindedly, but when examined it was the island. She was surprised the kid wanted that one, because there were no people but the kid said there could be (that's when she looked closer and saw she had drawn the island).

Might not be useful, but I associated it with "Agnes Cecilia" and "True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle" in my mind, so it likely came out around the same time and is of similar quality if you are familiar with those.

Note: this is a copy of a (very) old post in abandoned by poster - I lost access to that (very old) account

[SMH]

99% certain this book was sold/hawked/discussed by a vendor at an American Library Association conference (where my parents got us kids books en mass).

[Ayshe]

The Language of Goldfish seems likely?

[Andria]

Just a guess, but I Can Hear the Mourning Dove is about a teen girl struggling with mental illness and was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults in 1990.

[Andria]

Ayshe's guess seems more likely. I forgot that had been reissued in 1990.

[SMH]

Ayshe wrote: "The Language of Goldfish seems likely?"

Thank you! This is it! I have been looking for this for over a decade (and have involved several librarians in my search too). My original query for this book was made in 2015 - and you got it in under an hour!

[SMH]

Andria wrote: "Ayshe's guess seems more likely. I forgot that had been reissued in 1990."

I amazed that you would know (enough to forget) that a particular book had been reissued in a given year!