The Bottom Line
Pros
- A well-written, engrossing memoir
- Includes a number of useful hints, tips, ideas
- Presents a realistic yet hopeful perspective
- Kept me reading to the end
Cons
- There are similar memoirs on the market
- Lessons learned relate to a specific situation
- By no means comprehensive as a guide
Description
- A heartfelt memoir of raising an autistic son.
- A collection of lessons, hints and tips for parents.
- A positive take on the hard issues of autism.
- Relatively small resource guide and glossary.
Guide Review - Making Peace with Autism
If this were the first "autism mom" memoir I'd ever read, I would be carried away by Senator's impressive mix of frankness, pragmatism, intensity of feeling, and quality of prose. As it is, having read several such memoirs recently, I'm a little less enthusiastic.Like some of the other "autism mom" memoirs of recent years, this book is a combination memoir and guidebook: Each chapter ends with a set of "lessons learned," and the back of the book includes resources and glossary. These are useful, but not remarkably so. And, like most of those similar books, this one is also written by an educated, professionally successful suburban mom who is coping, to a large degree, with high expectations gone awry.
I'm a lot like Susan Senator: I, too, mourn the family that might have been; wish for a simpler path; occasionally run into difficult patches in an otherwise warm and loving marriage. So I can empathize, sympathize, and connect.
While I highly recommend this book as a good read and an emotionally authentic memoir, I can't help but hope that voices different from mine and Susan's begin to emerge from the autism community.
