National Network for Equitable Library Service

This is a book about a young Canadian girl, Mae Brown, who exhibited intelligence, stamina, commitment and courage under the exceptionally incapacitating condition of being both deaf and blind. Born in 1935, the third child of a bushworker on a homestead west of Thunder Bay, she walked the six miles to and from school as long as she was able to do so. She then received teaching at home from her devoted and determined mother through correspondence courses as her sight steadily decreased. She would lose her hearing later.

Although legally blind since birth, Kuusisto passed as sighted for more than thirty years. He describes his refracted visual perceptions and how pretending to see actually interfered with his participation in the sighted world. Then, by using a white cane and, eventually, a guide dog, he experienced new acceptance and mobility. Some descriptions of sex and some strong language.

In 1990 author Kyoko Mori returned to her native Japan to visit the "landscape of my childhood." There - looking for the house in which her mother killed herself, running on land that was once water, and retracing childhood train trips to her grandparents' farm - she relived the memories and uncovered the secrets that unlocked her past. In The Dream of Water, a series of chapters that are themselves "small perfections," she leads us to the "larger happiness" of an autobiography that is also a work of art.

Born to a wealthy and powerful yakuza boss, Shoko Tendo lived the early years of her life in luxury. However, when she was six, everything changed: her father was jailed, and the family fell into debt. Bullied by her classmates because of her father's activities, and terrorized at home by her father, who became a drunken, violent monster after his release from prison, Tendo rebelled. As a teenager she became a drug addict and a member of a girl gang. At the age of 15 she spent eight months in a juvenile detention center after getting into a fight with another gang.

Told against the backdrop of World War II and the Korean War, the author recounts the events of her childhood as a foreigner in Japan and her subsequent return to Korea.