Bronwen Hruska

Bronwen Hruska is the author of Accelerated, her fist novel.

From her Q & A with Jasmine Elist at the Jacket Copy blog:

"Accelerated" explores some controversial subjects: the competitiveness that exists in many schools and a laxness when it comes to prescribing drugs to young students. What inspired you to write this as a novel?

When my son was in third grade, his school suggested we get him evaluated for ADHD because he was having trouble lining up quietly to "transition" between classes. Sitting quietly for 45 minutes to do worksheets was challenging. But he never struck me as an ADD kid. He was funny, sociable, smart and not particularly antsy. But at the time, I thought the school, and later the psychiatrist who diagnosed him with inattentive-type ADHD, made strong cases for why "a little medication could really turn everything around for him." It was the beginning of a long and often frustrating episode with his school.

I started writing the book to vent some of those frustrations, using verbatim bits of dialogue from the most egregious conversations. But that personal frustration turned into something much larger when I started doing research for the book and saw the staggering statistics about how many young kids are being diagnosed -- and medicated -- for it. Perhaps most striking was the statistic that boys were being diagnosed 2.8 times more frequently than girls and it reminded me of an article I'd read that said that boys were being treated as "defective girls." As the mother of two sons, that really...[read on]

Visit Bronwen Hruska's website.

--Marshal Zeringue