By Bianca Schulze, The Children’s Book Review
Published: February 22, 2010
by Julia Keller
Reading level: Ages 10 and up
Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: EgmontUSA (September 8, 2009)
Source of book: Publicist
What to expect: Family, Rehabilitation, War
Wow. This book is raw and honest. As a writer for the Chicago Tribune, Author Julia Keller wrote a three-part series about traumatic brain injury. This experience, combined with the many real-life stories she was reading about American soldiers who were coming back home from Iraq and Afghanistan with brain injuries, was the motivation behind this incredible story.
Back Home is about a family who is forced to deal with, as a result from war, a huge change. Their father has been injured—he has a traumatic brain injury. From the view point of the eldest daughter in the family, Rachel, we are allowed a look into the personal and honest feelings of how difficult this can be for the entire family. Rachel’s character lets readers into her mind and offers them a deep and emotional understanding of what living with a family member who has suffered a traumatic brain injury is really like. This is a poignant novel that I recommend reading together as a family.
“… I kind of wished she’d go on that way forever, holding Robbie, rocking back and forth, while she asked her questions. She asked about why Dad couldn’t have stayed longer at Walter Reed, where he’d been making a lot of good progress. She asked about why there wasn’t a s[ecial hospital in town for people with brain injuries. She asked why there wasn’t more information available about people with brain injuires—not just for us, the families involved, but for the rest of the country, so they’d understand. Didn’t anybody care? Didn’t anybody see what these men and women had given up? How their lives were changed forever? And the lives of their families, their children? How things would never, ever be the same again?”
Add this book to your collection: Back Home