Review of “Wonderful”
by Melody Scott
I was told a long time ago that babies are born as little
animals and the parents’ job was to civilize them. I think “Wonderful” substantiates this.
It’s a story about several things: 1. Overcoming adversity--and what stages are
involved. 2. How much environment plays in a child’s
development. 3. 4. Is
it worse to be disfigured or mentally crippled?
4. To treat an obviously abnormally challenged child as a normal
child--realizing that at some point they have to be in a normal world
environment in order to learn how to handle it.
I have two personal stories (at least ones I’ve monitored
for years), whereby two sons of relatives had retinisis pigmatosa and would be
both blind at some point in their childhood. One child approached it realistically as
encouraged by his parents, and “got ready” by learning trades he could do
without sight. Pretty amazing. The other child was mired in self-pity and
decided he couldn’t handle it. He was a
casualty of life.
Another was a child of friends who was born with a bunch of
defects, the worst one being constant seizures.
He was therefore drugged to avoid as many seizures as possible, turning
in him into somewhat of a zombie. He was
given no slack by his family and expected to participate in all the other three
childrens’ activities. Halleluiah, this
year (at his age of 50) a medical cure (surgery) (only one surgeon in the
world--praise his hands!) was found and he has had NO seizures since. John currently is working on eliminating the
drugs a little at a time that his body is so accustomed to.
In “Wonderful” we saw a
metamorphosis from all reactions being negative to acceptance of the situation
August was afflicted with. I think,
since children accept physicalogical abnormal looks, August’s parents made play
dates for him with other little children, who then grew older as August
aged. They were already friends before
the abnormality was noticed. This stood
August in good stead with Summer and with the sister’s friend who was older,
but understood August’s challenges and supplied him with a helmet, among other
things, so he could be anonymous for pieces of time, then watched all he went
through growing up. She wanted August’s
family for their overwhelming love given to whoever was nearby.
There were the parents who
sympathized and understood the challenges August and his family faced, and
there were parents in the school who had taught their children that challenges
were so abnormal that they could not be acceptable. The children were really reflections of their
parents’ attitudes.
Overall, August’s parents were the heroes in this book in being
willing to throw August to the wolves and send him to a private/public school
when he was 5th grade level. The
children reacted in every possible spectrum and it took a year for acceptance
to win out because of the characters of the children--both those who wanted to
be admirable people and those who thought they might “catch” something from
August. I’m not mentioning the mean kids
because they were trying out meanness to see if it would work for them I
think. But of course it was a failed
experiment in the end.
Guess this was a book? Nice review.
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