New Releases by Torey L. Hayden

Gedetailleerd verslag van een geval van kindermishandeling.

His name was Kevin but his keepers called him Zoo Boy. He didn''t talk. He hid under tables and surrounded himself with a cage of chairs. He hadn''t been out of the building in the four years since he''d come in. He was afraid of water and wouldn''t take a shower. He was afraid to be naked, to change his clothes. He was nearly 16. Desperate to see change in the boy, the staff of Kevin''s adolescent treatment center hired Hayden. As Hayden read to him and encouraged him to read, crawling down into his cage of chairs with him, Kevin talked. Then he started to draw and paint and showed himself to have a quick wit and a rolling, seething, murderous hatred for his stepfather.

"Were all just somebody else''s kids..." A small seven-year-old boy who couldn''t speak except to repeat weather forecasts and other people''s words...A beautiful little girl of seven who had been brain damaged by terrible parental beatings and was so ashamed because she couldn''t learn to read...A violently angry ten-year-old who had seen his stepmother murder his father and had been sent from one foster home to another ...A shy twelve-year-old from a Catholic school which put her out when she became pregnant... "What do we matter?" "Why do you care?" They were four problem children-put in Torey Hayden''s class because no one else knew what to do with them. Together, with the help of a remarkable teacher who cared too much to ever give up, they became almost a family, able to give each other the love and understanding they had found nowhere else.

Sheila was wild, unreachable, abused--and a genius. She ws a child lost until a brilliant young teacher reached out.