A MOTHER'S MISSION 'I Want Kids to See They Aren't Alone'

AFTER PUBLISHER LAURI HORNIK WATCHED HER DAUGHTER STRUGGLE THROUGH ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION, SHE VOWED TO FIND A WAY TO HELP-THROUGH BOOKS

- EILEEN FINAN and DIANE HERBST

Lauri Hornik's daughter Ruby was in seventh grade when she asked her mother to buy her a book: The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath's classic autobiographical novel chronicling depression.

At the time Ruby was so crippled by anxiety and depression herself that she was refusing to go to school. When she got the book, she read it over and over and asked for a T-shirt bearing an illustration of the cover. "There were so few things I could relate to that I clung to any representation of mental illness," says Ruby, now 19.

Her mother was uneasy. After all, Plath, who died by suicide at age 30 just a month after the novel's first publication in 1963, details her main character's suicide attempts as she describes her descent into depression. "Ruby wanted to see her experience in a book and know she wasn't alone," Lauri says. The Bell Jar did that, but it did not provide Ruby with comfort. Instead the novel, in which the main character is institutionalized, left her feeling "hopeless," says Ruby. "It was telling This is the grim future awaiting you."

What Ruby needed, Lauri thought, were books offering hope. So Lauri, who has been an editor and publisher of children's literature for more than 30 years, decided to find them.

Earlier this year Lauri unveiled her own new Penguin Publishing imprint, Rocky Pond Books, which features titles aimed at young children through teenagers that focus on mental health and social-emotional learning. "I wanted books that kids could see themselves in and that include the mental illness experience in a way that [meets] their understanding-books I wish we had when Ruby was in middle school," says Lauri, 57. Those years were "a really awful time," she adds. "Ruby was suffering so much. It was all-encompassing."