Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs

Library Journal

Kamata, fiction editor of the online magazine Literary Mama, has compiled a collection of essays and poetry by writers raising children with special needs. Arranged from birth to adulthood, the selections by the likes of Jayne Anne Phillips and Bret Lott document the joys and sorrows of raising children with autism, Down syndrome, Angelman syndrome, fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, and Duchenne. This last condition, a hereditary form of muscular dystrophy, is marked by three stages: the onset of disease, the date of confinement to a wheelchair, and the date of death (invariably early). The pain of this knowledge is beautifully conveyed but extremely difficult to read. The authors are brutally honest about their frustration, their sorrow, and their anger, both at the outside world but also sometimes at their own children. As does The Elephant in the Playroom: Ordinary Parents Write Intimately and Honestly About the Extraordinary Highs and Heartbreaking Lows of Raising Kids with Special Needs, this work acts as an eloquent support group for these parents. Highly recommended.
—Elizabeth Safford