A Revolution of the Mind

From the chilly gray of her hometown on Chicago’s North Shore to a palm-speckled, sun-drenched California campus, young Ellen Boo Harvey is caught in a depressive descent into mania and melancholy that no one around her has the language, energy, or courage to look squarely in the face. Unheard or dismissed by her family and friends, Boo is forced to grapple with the ferocity of her Madness and the intricacies of her mind alone – careening from mental paralysis and near-invalidity to recovery and back again. Despite every privilege afforded to her as the well-heeled daughter of a blue blood family, Boo’s trajectory seems terminally inescapable until she meets Jude, a suicidal advocate for the mentally ill in Chicago, who teaches her how to rail against the machines and structures that work around the clock to render an entire class of Americans politically invisible and permanently broken. An assiduous and provocative debut, MV Perry’s A Revolution of the Mind is equal parts political manifesto, tortured self-portrait, and call to action that gazes unflinchingly at the causes and manifestations of contemporary American Madness.