Status
Call number
Description
"When Sarah Vallance is thrown from a horse and suffers a jarring blow to the head, she believes she's walked away unscathed. The next morning, things take a sharp turn as she's led from work to the emergency room. By the end of the week, a neurologist delivers a devastating prognosis: Sarah suffered a traumatic brain injury that has caused her IQ to plummet, with no hope of recovery. Her brain has irrevocably changed. Afraid of judgment and deemed no longer fit for work, Sarah isolates herself from the outside world. She spends months at home, with her dogs as her only source of companionship, battling a personality she no longer recognizes and her shock and rage over losing simple functions she'd taken for granted. Her life is consumed by fear and shame until a chance encounter gives Sarah hope that her brain can heal. That conversation lights a small flame of determination, and Sarah begins to push back, painstakingly reteaching herself to read and write, and eventually reentering the workforce and a new, if unpredictable, life. In this highly intimate account of devastation and renewal, Sarah pulls back the curtain on life with traumatic brain injury, an affliction where the wounds are invisible and the lasting effects are often misunderstood. Over years of frustrating setbacks and uncertain triumphs, Sarah comes to terms with her disability and finds love with a woman who helps her embrace a new, accepting sense of self."--Amazon.com.… (more)
Similar in this library
Publication
User reviews
Let me say this. Sarah Vallance deserves 5 stars for her incredible push to overcome her deficits. To go from an inability to read and huge loss of vocabulary, her severe memory loss, to the major accomplishment of writing a book is amazing. But it was the flat tone of the book that got her 3 stars instead.
Mixed feelings...I applaud Sarah for the chutzpah to get as far as she has....i'm incredibly happy that she found 'Louise' …. I understand the problems faced being an introvert but overall the book is similar to listening to someone give a speech in a monotone voice.
I really, really wanted to like this book. Based on the blurb I expected a story about overcoming a devastating injury. What I read was a very long “woe is me” where the author blames her bad behavior on other people and her injury. I just don’t understand why she did not
Bottom line, I don’t have much tolerance for people who throw the victim card down to explain every bad event in their life, especially if they absolutely refuse to take any initiative to heal themselves.