Kirkus Reviews QR Code
SARAH'S SONG: A True Story of Love and Courage by Janice A. Bums

SARAH'S SONG: A True Story of Love and Courage

By

Pub Date: Oct. 24th, 1995
Publisher: Warner

The brave, sad story of a young heterosexual couple who discovered soon into their marriage that they were HIV-positive. Vital and attractive, Janice and Bill Burns were as picture-perfect a couple as it was possible to be. During the first year of marriage they danced through life, enjoying restaurants, opera, ""nice car, nice stereo, nice credit card balances,"" and planning their family, to include a daughter named Sarah. Though it was Janice who first showed troubling symptoms--mysterious skin eruptions, swollen tonsils and adenoids--it was Bill who went first to be tested. This is the journal Janice began days after he was diagnosed. She was 23; he was 22. He died seven and a half years later. In the beginning, their emotions were a storm at sea: high on the waves of fantasy about a miracle cure, plunged into troughs of despair that they would never have children, and anger that Bill had probably carried the virus from a brief, pre-Janice homosexual affair. They kept the diagnosis secret as long as the symptoms would allow--two years of lies--fearful of being ostracized by family, friends, and colleagues. But their network holds together through the years of agonizing deterioration that are to come. Janice loses much of her hearing, Bill's eyesight is threatened, and he endures episodes of chills and fever. They both wear catheters and sit at home with his-and-hers IV drips. But they also move into a new home, go away for weekends, make new friends in the AIDS community, including their remarkable doctor, who never gave them false hope but also never gave up trying to prolong and ease their lives. A story full of pain, but in which anger and bitterness are overridden by courage and tenderness.