Language Arts

I loved Kallos' other books and there was no doubt in my mind when I read the description that this would be any different. There is something about her stories and her characters and her writing that appeal to me and I find it difficult to describe just what it is that gets to me . Maybe it's the vulnerability of the characters, their sadness, and how she makes you root for them and how there is the feeling of hope when you don't think it's possible . This one has a bit of the quirkiness of [book:Sing Them Home|96703] and the beautiful way people connect and touch each other's lives that I found in [book:Broken for You|96702].We are introduced to Cody as a two year old by his sister Emmy at the start. A precocious little one speaking words beyond his age and then suddenly losing his speech and exhibiting other signs that something just isn't right . Fast forward and Cody is almost 21, autistic, and on the verge of aging out of the state supported home .The point of view is mainly that of Cody's dad, Charles , who seems pretty fragile. We just don't know how fragile and broken until towards the end of the story . He's a Language Arts teacher, divorced and is trying to adjust to Emmy going off to college. His narrative alternates between the present and his fourth grade self as well as letters to Emmy.I wasn't sure at first what the focus on the cursive writing in the flashbacks was about but Charles' memories of fourth grade become meaningful in his remembrance of his classmate, Dana McGucken ,the boy dressed in white from his fourth grade class , most likely autistic but not diagnosed as such at that time.Kallos also provides the point of view of Sister Giorgia , a nun with dementia. We enter her past , her stories wondering what is real , what is imagined. It's sad as we see her feeling alone when the present she doesn't understand creeps into her memory, her present . She is committed to the same home where Cody lives .And if all of this isn't sad enough , I was thrown for a loop towards the end of the story while reading one of the letters Charles writes to his daughter . I cried from that point to the end . This is a sad , beautiful story about characters that I came to love and how they about deal with and live through some of the toughest things that life sometimes brings . It's about how we communicate with or without language, how we connect with other human beings .

The mystery that is autism, as well as its impacts on family relationships and friendships, forms the basis of this story. As a high school English teacher revisits his childhood experiences with an autistic classmate he befriended, he also copes with his nonverbal, autistic son who is about to “age-out” of the special-needs care system. An independent study project undertaken by one of his students ultimately reveals surprising insights into his autistic son’s capabilities and allows the teacher to discover and acknowledge some long-hidden truths about his own past. The characters are well drawn and fully realized in this novel, as are the struggles and heartbreaks families face (or avoid addressing) as they deal with a child who presents such challenges. Ultimately, however, it is an uplifting story that affirms the value of every life. This is a story that stayed with me long after I finished reading.

This book was deeply moving and achingly honest in respect to the challenges, but too, the simple moments of joy for those who parent children with autism. It was honest yet hopeful, touching without being overly sentimental, and powerful in its simplicity. Well- written, it was often truly funny.The story told here deserves to be written. It is an important window into the lives of those tasked to steward these special children. And I don't think it could have been done better. What a positive, beautiful book. A true charmer, and a must read for those who want to read important, worthy books.

I read this book, all 400 pages, in one day. While it isn't really plot-driven, I couldn't put it down.One reviewer described this book as "yoga for the heart," and I see what she means. It did stretch me and challenge me, and it seriously opened my heart. I read perhaps the last 200 pages on the edge of tears. I would describe as thoughtful and hopeful (in a way). I didn't give it five stars because sometimes detail bogged me down. Charles' letters to Emily, for example, while essential to the book, did not really interest me. What I loved, however, was the way the multiple strands came together so beautifully. Sometimes I wondered, but I trusted the author, and I wasn't disappointed.

In Language Arts, Stephanie Kallos tells the story of Cody, an autistic child, and those who his life impacts. Charles Marlow, his father, is a charter school English teacher haunted by his friendship with another mentally-disabled boy, Dana, in his own fourth-grade year. An incident that happens to Dana that year leads Charles to believe that his own son’s autism is some kind of karmic payback. Kallos revisits that fourth grade year and we learn that Charles is an only child living in a home with two warring parents, that he has a moment of fame when he wins a short story contest that exposes to the world the volatility within his home, and where he becomes a kind of genius at the difficult Palmer Penmanship Method, turning out loop after loop in perfect and impressive fashion, must to the delight of his teacher, Mrs. Braxton.Alison is Charles’ ex-wife and mother of Cody. As a lawyer, she comes at any conversation with the outcome methodically crafted at the outset. She engineers her son’s life in minute detail, much as she might research and prepare a case for trial. She and Charles are frequently at odds for what will bring about the most favorable outcome where Cody is concerned.Their younger daughter Emily also figures into the story, if only to tell us about her father and his motivations. He writes to her frequently in a kind of journeling style. We learn through her that Charles is not the most reliable narrator and makes us question all he’s told us about his life thus far.Ultimately Charles’ past and present come together in a breathtaking encounter with a mentally unbalanced nun. His redemption has come in a way he could never have anticipated. A beautiful story about what we see and believe about our lives.

Charles Marlow has had nearly 60 years of very unhappy life. He was an unhappy only child, suffering constantly from the rows of his ultra-boring, ultra-fed up parents Rita and Garrett. His best friend Donnie moved away to the 'land of sky-blue waters' (I'm assuming this was a fanciful name that Charles gave to Donnie's new home, rather than a euphemism for Donnie dying!). He was 'only average' at school (as he appears to have no interests as a child, this is not surprising). Even when he found his niche as an expert in 'Palmer penmanship' (a particular type of handwriting, supposed to have holistic properties) and somehow made the jump from that to joining the school's exclusive 'Language Arts' creative writing class, things went wrong - he developed writer's block after his first, acclaimed story (shamelessly based on his own life) won a local competition, and the terrible end to his friendship with Dana McGucken, a gentle autistic boy, destroyed his sense of purpose for a long time. Even when, after years drifting about from a Philosophy and Linguistics degree (so he can't have been that academically disengaged) to bar work, Charles finally 'found himself' in his relationship with the younger, beautiful and wealthy Alison, and training as a Language Arts teacher himself, his troubles weren't over, for his son Cody was born autistic, 'crashed' at the age of two and a half and became non-verbal and violent, and his marriage collapsed under the strain. Now Charles lives alone in the family home, unable to bond with Cody (who still can't talk at the age of 21), bickering with Alison whenever he sees her, haunted by his memory of Dana McGucken and missing his daughter Emmy, who's gone to university and seems to be making ever more bizarre excuses for not visiting. When he's not teaching, he spends his time drinking wine from the cups from Emmy's discarded dolls' tea-set and generally brooding on how unhappy he is. But - wait, gentle reader, for things are about to change! Alison becomes keen for Charles to take a more active role in caring for Cody, including visiting him in the home where he is placed more regularly, and with her as well as alone. Cody develops a strange bond with Sister Giorgia, an elderly Italian nun and Palmer Method instructor suffering from dementia, who's placed in the same home as him. And one of Charles's students - Romy, an artist - decides she wants to do an art project focussing on both Sister Giorgia and Cody. Could all this - plus a letter from Dana McGucken's mother who wants to see Charles - lead to his rehabilitation?If the cover, in which an angelic boy floats in the sky making celestial 'Palmer loops' doesn't give it away, the rather sentimental tone of the first few chapters will - yes, of course Charles will find salvation. This is a book of a very definite kind (Sue Monk Kidd writes similar ones and I was interested to see she gave this a rave write-up) in which the protagonist is On a Journey to Salvation. It's a bit like a very sugary modern take on the Book of Job - the writer heaps misery on her main character, then turns it round in the second part of the book so that - usually with much public weeping and exoneration - he or she realizes how happy they are, and how amazing life is, and ends up beloved and content. The trouble is with this book that the intent is too heavy-handed, Kallos overdoes the misery to a near-comic extent, and Charles is just not an interesting enough character for us - well me, at any rate! - to care if he finds salvation. I found him simply incredibly boring. As a child suffering adversity, he wasn't a brave, determined character like Dickens's David Copperfield, who reads his way out of the misery of having Mr Murdstone for a stepfather - Charles just flounced about eating trash, watching horror films and cartoons and reading 'Playboy', and wallowing in endless self pity. His sudden (and short-lived) friendship with Dana seemed completely out of character, as did his obsession with 'Palmer handwriting loops' and I've no idea why being able to do Palmer handwriting suddenly made Charles supposedly such a wonderfully creative writer (actually, his story sounded maudlin and pretty horrible). In the 'adult' sections we were told repeatedly what a brilliant Language Arts teacher Charles was - but as Kallos hardly depicts him teaching, and rarely if ever shows him enthusing about a book or poem or trying to write again himself - this didn't convince. What we largely saw was his monumental nastiness to his wife, his tendency to retreat into a world of fantasy and again lashings of self-pity. He was the sort of protagonist that I couldn't wait to say goodbye to.It didn't help that most of the other characters were either caricatures, unpleasant or hard to understand. Kallos set herself a real challenge making Cody so deeply autistic - if a main character can't speak and can barely communicate by gesture either, it's hard to understand anything much about them, or feel any kind of empathy for them. He ended up more a symbol of how the other characters couldn't communicate, and were just learning to by the end of the book, than anything else. And I wasn't sure how exactly the Palmer System helped him so much - indeed, the indication throughout the book that the Palmer System of handwriting was some sort of magical 'cure for all' didn't convince me, I'm afraid. Sister Giorgia was potentially the most interesting character, but as Kallos chose to tell most of her story through her dementia-ridden mind she was more confusing than anything else - I couldn't work out what all her fantasies about 'getting married' were about, who had raped her (German? Italian? American? British?), why everyone in the home called her 'Mrs D'Amati' when she was a nun, or what exactly had gone on in her past (other than that she taught the Palmer System of handwriting to autistic boys - now wasn't that a coincidence!). Elsewhere, Dana was a stereotype of the gentle, innocent victim who made Charles Dickens's suffering children look as brutally realistic as those of Emile Zola (ie Dana was massively sentimentalized - and if he was that disruptive in class would he really have been in mainstream education?), Alison came across as self-righteous, spoilt and unpleasant, Rita and Garrett Marlow were one-dimensional 'nasty people', Mrs Braxton a parody of the 'stern, kindly teacher', the other pupils caricatures of 'class swat', 'class bully' etc etc and Romy, the art student, so thinly depicted as to have little personality.The book had some plot problems too - it took an age to get going, and some of the more interesting bits - Romy's art sessions, for example, Sister Giorgia's past or the search to find Cody an adult home - were skimmed over, while other bits - Charles's maudlin letters to his daughter, his memories of his Very Unhappy Childhood and the scenes with Dana - just went on and on. I'm afraid I guessed both plot twists quite early (the one with Emmy is thunderingly obvious from the point she doesn't come home for Christmas, though even I was surprised by the nastiness of the twist here). And I found the whole text overloaded with an awful, cloying sentimentality, and a kind of trite New Age wisdom. The mother describing her son as 'an angel, just here for a short time', Charles's final letter to his daughter, the raptures that the characters went into over 'making Palmer loops', the way that everyone seemed to love each other and Cody had a personality transformation in the final sections - it just felt too manufactured and heavy-handed. When Charles started quoting Meher Baba I'm afraid I nearly threw the book across the room.I've just finished Kallos's second novel, and on the basis of that I would say she definitely can write, has a beautifully original way of seeing the world at times, and is certainly talented. But for me this heavy-handed, overly sentimental book with its boring one-dimensional characters and message that Love - and Palmer Handwriting Method - Cures All was a distinctly disappointing follow up. Read 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' or Charlotte Moore's wonderful, wonderful non-fiction book 'George and Sam' for a more perceptive, humorous and less sickly-sweet take on autism. And read Francine Prose's darkly witty 'Blue Angel' or Domenica Rosa's deliciously escapist 'Summer School' for books on 'Language Arts'. As for Stephanie Kallos - I really hope she gets back on track with her next novel, as her second (and hopefully her first which I shall read next) hinted at a writer with some really special qualities.

I have discovered this novel pretty late, but what a pleasure it has been! I have savoured each word, and was sad when the story ended. Stephanie Kallos is extremely talented. Her style is unique, reminiscent of John Irving, and Muriel Barbery (The Elegance of the Hedgehog). I am looking forward to reading more of her books. Extremely well done!