Hell , being black is hard enough .... Please don ’ t add crazy . So writes Bebe Moore Campbell in her compelling new novel that confronts two taboo subjects in the African American community : mental disorder and homosexuality . The book is named for the three-day maximum period that a mentally ill adult can be legally held in a public health facility if she demonstrates a danger to herself or others . The novel tells the story of Keri Whitmore , a successful black businesswoman struggling to care for a teenage daughter with bipolar disorder , which causes radical mood swings between mania and depression . The fictional prose is not meant to offer an inside look at brain disease . Rather it presents a brutally honest and devastating account of a mother ’ s love and the desperate degree to which she will go to rescue her child from mental illness . In doing so , Campbell exposes the woeful inadequacies of our current public health care system in treating such patients and introduces the novel ’ s greatest value : its insight into the challenges faced by people who must care for such loved ones . Nevertheless , this noble effort is undermined when Campbell invokes slavery to convey the horrors of mental illness .
--Scientific American
Bebe Moore Campbell