On the Third Ward

On The Third Ward, is a beautiful, surreal book that will leave you entranced and deeply moved. T. Degens weaves a masterful spell of life and death, of real and imaginary, of truth and horror. The Third Ward is shown to the reader through the eyes of Wan Da, the girl from the outside, who is sent away from beloved grandfather by her troubled family to an isolated hospital that shields all it's patients from contact with the outside world. Friends and siblings are forbidden, and parents are only allowed to visit less than once a month. But the wards are alive with a reality all their own. Death is very real to everyone on the ward, but this terrible reality is held at bay. Carla dreams of handsome suitors, ignoring the cast that holds her immobile indefinitely, P.B. is even more horribly confined to a two dimensional world, yet she creates beauty there with her fantastic paper cut outs. Over the ward reigns the mysterious Empress of China, who is surrounded by lovely things and tells the most wonderful stories. Wan Da is drawn into their lovely false worlds, and it is this world that she seeks when she and P.B. make their brave escape to the outside world-and perhaps it is what they find. Surreal and unreal, it is a novel of heartwrenching beauty and terrible triumph, of the very limits of the human spirit, when children are pushed to the edge of reality... and jump. This novel will engulf your mind and haunt your thoughts long after you turn the last page.