Summary:

This unusual story, beautiful and overwhelmingly sad, is set in Sicily on the craggy and barren island of Lampadusa surrounded by the bluest of seas. Everyone in the small fishing and canning village may be related; certainly, this is a place where secrets are not possible. Grazia (Varria Golino) appears to be the loveliest and most loving mother and wife, although her carefree, even childlike behavior is foreboding. The camera loves her and so do viewers who are ravished by her beauty and innocence.

With children positioned on the back of her Vespa, she and they escape to a deserted beach where she swims topless with her children; later, she releases hundreds of howling stray dogs from their inhumane confinement. Not surprisingly, spied-upon actions such as these produce critical response from more conservative neighbors whose norms are less capricious.

When signs of instability and manic depression become apparent, the community joins together to suggest hospitalization to her very supportive and heart-broken husband (Vincenzo Amato). She, like the caged-up dogs, seems to deserve the kind of freedom epitomized by her trips to the beach and will not, we sense, survive medical "imprisonment."

At this juncture, just as her wings are to be clipped, the story’s unexpected turn forces the mourning village to wonder about human frailty and reality. The ending, ultimately unclear and haunting, is a celebration of imaginative madness and ephemeral beauty. Visually stunning.

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Summary:

Oscar, the narrator of this fresh fictional gem, is ten years old. Because his form of leukemia has not responded to treatment, he has been living in a French hospital for a very long time. His parents, who bring him gifts and surely love him, are uncomfortable during their infrequent visits. Dr. Dusseldorf and the nurses are kind, but indirect and distant in their communications with him. Because no one talks to him about his illness or what is likely to happen, he feels isolated, alone, and miserable.

When Mamie-Rose, a very elderly hospital "pink lady" (hospital volunteer) with an exotic past, enters Oscar's life, she brings honesty, warmth, and comfort to the lost child known as Bald Egg. Guided by this incredible person--a blunt-spoken, irreverent woman who touches him, kisses him, and tells him wondrous stories of her wrestling feats--the boy grows stronger. Who wouldn't under the influence of the Strangler of Languedoc?

Of course Oscar is going to die. In addition to her generous companionship and her introductions of him to other children in the hospital, Mamie-Rose suggests letters to God as a way of feeling less lonely. "So God, on the occasion of this first letter I've shown you a little of what my life in the hospital is like here, where they now see me as an obstacle to medicine, and I'd like to ask you for clarification on one point: Am I going to get better? Just answer yes or no. It's not very complicated. Yes or no. All you have to do is cross out the wrong answer. More tomorrow, kisses. P.S. I don't have your address: what do I do" (65).

With Mamie-Rose treating him like a real kid, "move your but . . . we're not ambling along like snails" and Oscar scripting very candid letters to God, the first-person story about loneliness, love, and compassion is presented with spirited imagination. Oscar's story is quite extraordinary--and unforgettable.

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Summary:

This story details several months in the life of a thirteen-year-old with incurable kidney disease and of her extended family--the policeman father who has cared for her since her mother ran off, the mother who reappears in time to learn she is the most likely donor, two sets of grandparents and several of the father's close friends. Two women in the father's life find their romantic attachments to him complicated by his role as his daughter's caretaker.

As Mary Grace's health deteriorates, her maturing accelerates. Each of the principal characters has to come to terms not only with impending loss, but with how this crisis reconfigures old patterns of family conflict and dependency. The story continues after her death as focus shifts to the father's grief, mourning, and new empathy with victims of accident and loss.

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Summary:

Eleven-year-old Amy has been hiding cookies beneath her bed, drinking gallons of liquid to slake her thirst, getting headaches, feeling irritable, and failing to grow though she's been eating huge meals for months by the time she faints and is taken to the hospital. There she is diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Though she feels disoriented and angry, she is immediately put into a training group with other kids around her age who have been recently diagnosed.

She has to learn how to maintain a carefully balanced diet and how to give herself insulin injections. The male nurse who teaches them is himself a diabetic as well as a competent, cheerful young man who takes the edge off the experience. He makes it clear to Amy and the others that the primary responsibility for their health maintenance routines lies with them personally.

After release from the hospital, Amy begins to deal with the social adjustments her disease demands. Her brother and parents are helpful, but uncertain about how much to change their own eating habits to accommodate her. Her younger sister finds the accommodations trying and unfair. Amy's friends also have learning to do.

It helps her that she knows a few other diabetic kids, including Coby, a boy who has struggled with his own resentment and the consequences of sloppy monitoring of his condition, but has learned how to control his diet for the sake of staying on the baseball team where he's a star player. Their friendship helps Amy transition into "normal" life hopefully.

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The narrator, who has been a counselor at a summer camp, brings a friend home to meet her computer-wizard older brother, Eric, but finds him acting very strange--overprotective, defensive, and aggressive. Later his inexplicable behavior shows up at the dinner table. He is unreceptive to parents' inquiries. Readers learn some of the delusional thoughts from italicized passages interspersed with the narrative of a family recognizing mental illness and making treatment decisions.

Eric is hospitalized after an episode in which he threatens the family with a kitchen knife. He is released on medication in a matter of weeks, but continues to behave strangely if not dangerously--he asks his sister at one point if she knows any "secret numbers"--and she realizes his new condition is not simply going to go away, but has opened a whole new chapter in family life and requires new and careful adaptations.

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Summary:

Geneva Jordan, a successful stage actress in New York, reluctantly agrees to stay for a month with her thirteen-year-old nephew who has Down syndrome so that his parents can take a long-postponed and much-needed vacation. She is unmarried and has no children herself, has always found herself a little intimidated about close interaction with the boy, and leads a complicated personal and professional life in New York which the requisite month in Minnesota will interrupt.

Nevertheless, she takes on the job and gradually finds herself adapting to rural life, substitute parenthood, and the special needs of her nephew. She makes friends with the mother of Rich's best (and only real) friend, Conrad, who has cerebral palsy. After the month is over, she returns to New York, only to realize that her life lacks a dimension that caregiving gave it.

She also realizes she left a good man behind in Minnesota--a local divorced father who has become an unsought love interest. Nevertheless, she remains on stage and in the city until the death of her nephew's friend calls her back to Minnesota, and to the man with whom she can finally imagine taking on a family life of her own.

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Summary:

Keely, whose three "best friends" are a dominant clique in their class, notices that a classmate, Anya, appears to be wearing a wig. The girls confer about it at lunchtime, wonder whether to ask about it, and theorize that she may have cancer and be undergoing chemotherapy. Stef, long the most aggressive among the four friends, suggests that Keely talk with Anya and find a way to determine whether it is a wig, but Keely refuses, recognizing in Anya, whom she rarely notices, a quality of loneliness she hadn’t seen before.

Their curiosity is satisfied when Anya’s wig comes off during a gym exercise and she runs out and remains absent for several days. Keely decides to visit Anya and learns that she has a rare disease, alopecia areata, which is painless and otherwise harmless, but causes hair to fall out, sometimes all over the body. When she asks if she can help, Anya replies, "Not unless you want to give me your hair."

Keely researches the disease for class and finds that there is a foundation that collects long hair for wigs for patients suffering from Anya’s condition, so she cuts off her own long hair and encourages classmates to do the same in a gesture of solidarity with Anya, in the process defining a new independence from the clique of friends who have too long shaped and confined her judgments of others.

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Summary:

Twelve-year-old Jake moves from Boston to the rural port town of Wicasset, Maine, with his mother, father, and six-year-old brother, who has "fits" as a result of what we now know to be cerebral palsy. The family keeps Frankie hidden, because neighbors in Boston regarded his disease as evidence of some wrongdoing on the parents' part and shunned them. It is 1838, and the father has lost his job in a bank because of the "Panic of 1837," and takes a job at a lumber mill for which he is ill suited. As the job keeps him away except for weekends, Jake has to learn how to gather food, fuel, and local information to care for his mother and brother in a small, drafty house.

He gets to know neighbor children whose mother remains hidden because, as he later learns, she is a hopeless alcoholic. Eventually he gets a job with the schoolmaster/jailer, befriends a mentally handicapped young man with no home, and gets to know the local doctor who persuades him that the community will accept his brother and family, and that their secret need not remain hidden. After weeks upstate on a logging trip, the father comes home with an arm crushed in an accident. The doctor helps him find work as a clerk in the custom house.

In the father's absence, in addition to his other accomplishments, Jake helped prison inmates and the schoolmaster/jailer's family escape a burning building, winning the gratitude and respect of the townspeople. On his father's return and promise of new work, he has renewed hope of private tutoring that might prepare him for college despite the family's poverty.

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This memoir, written with the help of Bart Davis, was published two years after the publication of a study that documented Price's "hyperthymestic syndrome"--the exceptional comprehensive memory of the details of daily life that dates back to her early adolescence.  Price tells of the relief and fascination she felt in working with researchers at U.C. Irvine to arrive at a diagnosis of her rare, and in some ways unprecedented, condition.  The narrative includes both her own account of the testing she underwent for purposes of diagnosis and brain mapping, and her story of growing up with an exceptional, and in some ways burdensome capacity to remember with detailed accuracy everything that happened, by date, including vivid replication of the emotions and sense experiences of the remembered moment.  Her story includes a particularly thoughtful chapter on losing her husband suddenly and the role of memory in mourning.

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Summary:

This impactful memoir recounts the events of the summer of 1996 when Greenberg's fifteen-year old daughter Sally "was struck mad," as he puts it (3).   Greenberg's portrayal of Sally's behavior as her illness erupts -seemingly from nowhere-- is staggeringly vivid and trustworthy, as is his description of the series of reactions that belong to him, the father who cannot protect, cannot even reach his daughter, although she sits beside him.   

A then-struggling writer, Greenberg unfolds the story, set in a ramshackle, five-story walk-up apartment in the Greenwich Village where he and his second wife (Sally's step-mother) reside.  Among the many rewards of this story is a colorful slice of a New York city life, around the block and in the locked ward.

Greenberg takes us through Sally's initial onset, her sleeplessness, grandiosity, delusions, and frantic drive to communicate, "a pile-up of words without sequence" (17).  The portrayal of his and his wife's initial shock; the diagnosis, "fulminating mania" with indicators for bipolar disorder; Sally's eventful hospitalization, and her return home in a medicated state that Greenberg finds almost as unsettling a transformation as the onset of the mania.  He details building a rapport with Sally's intriguing psychiatrist, as he observes Sally's efforts to do the same. Greenberg tells us about the day he decided to take Sally's medication -for a variety of understandable and also desperate reasons.  This sequence is brilliantly funny and poignant. And he gives us glimpses of the cost to his marriage of these events, bringing the stresses to light with astounding compassion for all concerned.

This memoir moves with exceptional grace between unfolding events and Greenberg's beautifully informed reflections on them.  Observations about the mental illness of James Joyce's daughter, Lucia, are woven through the text, as are insights and characterizations from other writers and doctors, like that of Eugen Bleuler who, Greenberg informs us, coined the word schizophrenia in 1911, when he observed that "in the end his patients were stranger to him than the birds in his garden.  But if they're strangers to us," Greenberg adds, "what are we to them? (24)" Perhaps the most gorgeous and unforgettable feature of the book is Greenberg's way with words, and his attentiveness to Sally's altered relation to words: "Afraid.  Frayed.  Why are you so a-frayed? She keeps asking" (25).

The story of this hard summer draws in a cast of compelling characters, including Michael's mother who arrives, it seems, from another world -of material comfort and propriety-bringing surprising sources of comfort to her adult son and to her granddaughter.  We also get to know Steve, Greenberg's older brother who, also suffering from mental illness, lives the life of a shut-in only blocks away from Michael, who brings him groceries and looks after him, at times a challenging job.

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