A well-intended snapshot of one family’s experience with autism.
A dramatic look at the life of a single mother who learns her child is autistic and must re-frame her worldview accordingly.
In this earnest book that’s high on drama and light on tension, Cassie Delaine’s an ordinary college student on the night of her 21st birthday when a date with a handsome guy leaves her with more than just warm birthday wishes. Coincidentally, days later she learns she is also the newest lottery jackpot winner, a fact she keeps to herself. After she tragically loses her parents in a terrible accident shortly thereafter, Cassie learns she’s pregnant. Fast-forward three years, and Cassie’s a single mom, struggling with her high-energy, into-everything toddler. Young Brian is inflexible about his preferences and routines, won’t make eye contact and arches his back away from Cassie every time he’s picked up. Play dates are disasters, outings end in scenes, and Cassie passively wonders where her happy ending could be, while her frustration with the situation grows to the breaking point. Brian is finally diagnosed as autistic, and it shatters Cassie’s world–she must reconcile the child she believed Brian was with the child he is. When she connects with other moms at local support group, Cassie gets the opportunity to re-examine her idea of a happy ending while she learns how to best meet her son’s needs, balancing them with her own. As she gets more involved with her new friends, she finds unexpected but welcome respite, relief and new meaning in her life. The detailed prose, informative and heart-wrenching by turns, offers readers a glimpse into the lives–the good, the bad and even the ugly–of all kinds of families with autistic children with warmth and compassion.
A well-intended snapshot of one family’s experience with autism.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4196-6449-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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