This book is part memoir and part psychology class. Hidden valley Rd is the story of a family with 12 children and 6 of them develop schizophrenia. It alternate between the story of the family told mostly from the point of view of the 2 youngest children, the only girls, Mary and Margaret, and the development and history of the classification and treatment of schizophrenia.
If you don't love reading about trials and study, you might not enjoy this as much, although the scientific part is really well written.