Damage

Overview

Damage follows Austin Reid, a high school running back whose life looks, from the outside, like exactly what a small Texas town expects of its star athlete. He has a starting spot on the football team, a steady girlfriend, and a family that seems unremarkable. A.M. Jenkins writes the novel entirely from inside Austin's head, and that vantage point is where the book's real subject becomes clear: underneath the routines of practice, games, and weekend plans, Austin is sinking into a depression he can't name and doesn't know how to talk about.

The narrative tracks the widening gap between what Austin performs for his coaches, teammates, and girlfriend, Heather, and what he actually feels — a flattening of interest, an exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix, and thoughts that grow darker as the football season builds toward its climax. Jenkins resists turning this into a lesson with a tidy moral; instead the prose stays close to Austin's numbed, matter-of-fact interior voice, letting readers sit with the disconnect rather than having it explained to them.

Because the story never steps outside Austin's perspective to reassure the reader, it reads less like an issue novel than a character study of depression from within — quiet, specific, and unresolved in the way real mental illness often is.

A Portrait of Depression Without a Safety Net

When it was first published, Damage stood out among young adult novels for refusing the narrative scaffolding — a sympathetic adult, a support group, a clear turning point — that often signals a "problem novel" is steering its protagonist toward recovery. Jenkins instead builds suspense out of ordinary scenes: a practice, a date, a family dinner, each one revealing a little more of the distance between Austin's outward competence and his internal flatness. Critics and librarians who champion the book tend to point to this restraint as its strength: it treats depression as something that can hide in a seemingly successful teenager rather than announcing itself through obvious warning signs.

The novel sits alongside A.M. Jenkins's other work exploring difficult interior lives — including stories told from the perspectives of troubled or marginalized narrators — and is often cited in discussions of YA fiction that takes male adolescent mental health seriously, a subject historically underrepresented in a genre more often associated with female protagonists processing emotional crisis. Its use in classrooms and reading lists has generally been tied to that gap, with educators valuing a story that lets a male athlete's inner life be fragile without the narrative punishing or redeeming him for it.

Why Damage Has Been Challenged

The passages that draw the most scrutiny are the ones closest to Austin's suicidal thinking — scenes where he considers ending his life, including his access to a weapon, rendered without narratorial distance or explicit condemnation. Because Jenkins keeps the reader locked inside Austin's perspective rather than cutting away to an adult or authority figure who contextualizes what's happening, some parents and reviewers have argued the book risks normalizing or even modeling suicidal ideation for vulnerable teen readers rather than clearly warning them away from it. Related objections focus on the novel's frank treatment of teenage sexuality within Austin's relationship with his girlfriend, which some reviewers feel compounds concerns about age-appropriateness.

Supporters of keeping the book available counter that its unflinching, non-moralizing approach is precisely what gives it value as a tool for recognizing depression in peers who seem outwardly fine. In this catalog's records, Damage has been formally challenged in 1 state and 1 district, reflecting a narrow but pointed dispute over how explicitly a young adult novel should be allowed to depict a teenager's unmediated contemplation of self-harm.