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Back Home (2009)

by Julia Keller(Favorite Author)

3.43 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1606840487 (ISBN13: 9781606840481)

languge

English

genre

Middle Grade & Children's

publisher

EgmontUSA

review 1: What happens when your Dad comes home from Iraq with a traumatic brain injury and missing limbs? A gritty account of a family trying to adapt to their world changing. Mom is gone for weeks while Dad is at Walter Reed. She finally returns home because he isn't ready to leave yet. When he finally comes home he requires total care, and an assortment of therapists and counselors troop through their lives. They have to modify the house to accommodate his wheelchair. Neighbors and relatives are there for them at first, then fade away. As he fails to improve the family has to make tough choices about the future. No magic recovery, no cutesy ending, just the reality of caring for someone who can't help themself.
review 2: Julia Keller is a journalist who's written nonf... moreiction stories about the large number of soldiers returning from Iraq with traumatic brain injuries. In some ways, that's a benefit for this book, because the details about the teen protagonist and her family dealing with her father's traumatic brain injury are right on. In other ways, it's not so good. To me, the main character is not developed very much at all; I knew hardly anything about her by the end of the book. Of course, this is a realistic portrayal of how one family member's devastating injury can seem to take over the whole family, but as a story from the daughter's point of view, I didn't feel like it worked as well without her as a real presence in the book. Still, for people who are going through something like this, it will ring very true. less

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