Book Review--Twilight Children, by Torey Hayden

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, Torey Hayden is one of my favorite authors. Twilight's Children is her latest book, just out this year. Most of her books are about her experiences in the classroom, teaching emotionally disturbed children. This book is about her experiences working in the psychiatric ward of a children's hospital. The focus is on three people with whom she worked.

Cassandra was nine years old. At age five, she was abducted by her father. He kept her for two years. Finally Cassandra was found three states away, alone, starving, filthy, and forgaing for food in garbage cans. When she finally returned to her mother, she didn't speak, and even when she began speaking again, she refused to talk about anything that had happened during the time she had been abducted. She had post-traumatic stress disorder and had been sexually abused.

Drake was a happy, intelligent four-year-old. Yet he never spoke, except to his mother. His extremely overbearing grandfather brought him to Torey, knowing that her specialty was elective mutism, and expected her to get him to speak immediately. Was there something physically wrong with Drake, or had he suffered some horrible trauma that had caused him to stop speaking? The truth was actually quite shocking.

Gerda was an elderly woman in a rehabilitation unit close to the children's hospital. A stroke had robbed her of most of her speech. Torey usually only worked with children, but she agreed to see Gerda as a favor to a friend. She ends up learning interesting details about Gerda's past, though Gerda had a tendency to speak in monologues rather than actually being able to converse. The attitude of some of the people who worked with the elderly came as something of an unpleasant shock to Torey.

I always like Torey Hayden's books, but this one, though still good, wasn't necessarily one of my favorites. The three cases, though interesting, were disconnected, and there wasn't as much of a unified story as with her stories about teaching, and her other book about working as a therapist, Murphy's Boy . I wasn't even quite sure why she included Gerda's case, since it was so different from any of her other cases and though it was rather interesting (and sad), there didn't seem to me to be that much to say about it. I did feel bad for Gerda though; she had no family that really cared, and her cats were put to sleep since she couldn't take care of them anymore. That made me mad. She had a lot of cats and it would have been hard to find homes for them all, but it still made me mad; it was just so cold, getting rid of her loved ones.

Anyway, not quite as good as her other books, but still really enjoyable and thought-provoking.