Making Friends with Monsters
“I knew I had to break this stranglehold of silence around mental illness,” Rostirolla says. “That’s when the idea of the book was born.”
LOS ANGELES (PRWEB)
March 09, 2023
Award-winning author Sandra L Rostirolla will celebrate the release of Making Friends With Monsters on April 4, 2023. Readers can pre-order the book at any bookstore and available upon request at local libraries.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide has become the second leading cause of death among children 10 to 14. Sandra L Rostirolla decided to change this terrifying statistic, fueled by stigma and silence.
Based on the author’s experiences with suicide in her family, Making Friends With Monsters offers a language for young adults to talk about the dark emotions they often face but bury, before it’s too late. Publishers Weekly Booklife called the book an “urgent, unflinching YA novel about the ‘monsters’ of depression and family dysfunction” (Editor’s Pick).
Rostirolla’s father died by suicide when she was thirteen. Since then, two of her brothers also died by suicide. The family dealt with their loss in silence. When she met a friend who told her that the hardest thing about her ex-partner’s suicide was how to explain it to her three young daughters (ages 11, 14 and 20), the recurring theme of silence around suicide hit hard.
“I knew I had to break this stranglehold of silence around mental illness,” Rostirolla says. “That’s when the idea of the book was born.”
Her novel, Making Friends With Monsters, uses “monsters” as a metaphor for the dark forces inside of us, bringing to life what drives them and how we can talk about them and confront them.
Set on a struggling farm in Australia, Making Friends With Monsters follows 12-year-old Sam on a quest to find out about the monsters plaguing his older brother Ben and his parents. Through Sam’s eyes, readers discover just how sneaky one’s monster can be and how hard it is to get rid of––especially because most people don’t know they even have a monster!
Rostirolla navigates Sam’s journey with compassion and grit, not shying away from stark realities and raw emotion while also exploring the deep well of resilience that will arise in coming to know our monsters and finding a way back to the light.
Born in Sydney, Australia, Sandra Rostirolla graduated from the University of Sydney with a BAppSc (Physiotherapy). She now lives in Los Angeles, where she presently works as a development executive in the film industry.
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