The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy Review

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(More customer reviews)Raised by an imaginative father and launched on motherhood with the poetry of Wordsworth in her heart, Priscilla Gilman longed to create for her own children the romantic vision of childhood she felt herself to have inhabited. But, as the title of her book indicates, her dream was not to be--at least, not in the terms she had perceived it. In the last decades of the twentieth century, research on learning disorders expanded almost exponentially, and with it came teaching methods and even special schools that could address these education needs. Yet, even so, for quite some time, the Gilmans could not find a school that would accept their son, Benjamin.
I read this book in the hope of understanding brilliant students with social phobias, and though the *The Anti-Romantic Child* turned out to be about a child with a rather different set of challenges, I came away from it awed by the power of unconditional and unrelenting love. A former English professor from Vassar, Gilman writes beautifully, allowing the reader to enter her own maelstrom of emotion at each stage of Benj's development--from the heights of reveling in the joy of an exceptionally precocious child to the depths of hearing that he is, as far as intelligence goes, not much more than a parrot, and then on to the lonely machete work in the jungle of the unknown in an effort to prove the pundits wrong. Though the emotions go up and down, however, the determined struggle to make her son capable of receiving and expressing love goes on apace.
As Gilman moves chronologically through Benj's life, she cites lines of verse from Wordsworth, whom she eventually realizes knew both the light and the dark of childhood. Without the Wordsworthean cushion, it is hard to see how Ms. Gilman could have dealt with everything that life hurled at her and her boy. And certainly Wordsworth provided a deep, deep well. Gilman shows anew that, though Benj responded to the world differently, he, too, came "trailing clouds of glory" at his birth.
I highly recommend this book to parents, families, and teachers of special children. They will, I believe, find rest in the knowledge that love can indeed work miracles.


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