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THE BOY WHO LOVED TORNADOES: A Mother’s Story
By Randi Davenport
Algonquin, 384 pp., $23.95
Rational people like to think that in naming a problem, we are halfway to solving it. But what is a mother to do when her child is suffering from a problem that has no name?
This was the dilemma that Randi Davenport had to wrestle with every hour of every day as her lively, quirky young son, Chase, began to slip ever deeper into a painful unreality that eluded diagnosis and defied treatment. Atypical autism, seizure disorder, developmental disorder: A parade of doctors tentatively suggested label after label. None of them fit. Nothing made the boy better. By his mid-teens Chase, tormented by paranoid terrors, was being handed off like a live grenade from one baffled institution to another. Heartbreakingly, he no longer recognized his mother.
She recognized him, though, and fought for him with primal determination against a system that seemed to consist of nothing but roadblocks and dead ends. This is her gripping account of that unrelenting battle. It isn’t a medical thriller that climaxes with an 11th-hour cure. The light of its happy ending burns low, but in this courageous mother’s eyes it shines as bright as the sun.
THE BIRTH OF LOVE
By Joanna Kavenna
Metropolitan, 320 pp., paperback, $15
Theory is not an appealing starting point for fiction. British author Joanna Kavenna approaches this multipartite novel with didactic intent — to compare and contrast childbirth over time — and proceeds to lecture.
One plotline is set in a lunatic asylum in Vienna in 1865, where Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, whom we learned about in high school biology, has been confined, driven mad with guilt over the deaths of new mothers from infection caused by doctors’ unclean hands. Another narrative imagines a tedious totalitarian future in which ordinary human reproduction is a crime against the state.
Sandwiched between these leaden bookends is a plotline in which an overwrought woman goes into labor with her second child. She is counting on a serene home birth, but her baby has other plans.
Finally, a reclusive scribbler named Michael Stone delivers himself of a novel — the Semmelweis narrative — but is unfit to cope with even this modicum of worldly success; oddly, this secondary plot is the only one with any originality or complexity of characterization.
Like the literary agent who expresses skepticism about the general appeal of Michael’s book, we have to wonder who Kavenna imagined as her audience for these unnerving tales.
THE SECRET LIFE OF THE GROWN-UP BRAIN: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind
By Barbara Strauch
Viking, 256 pp., $26.95
Baby boomers can take heart, according to science editor Barbara Strauch. Notwithstanding the occasional senior moment, the middle-aged person (generously defined as age 40 to the late 70s) may be slower to absorb new information but outperforms younger people on tasks calling for experience and judgment. Brain cells regenerate into old age and appear to respond positively to exercise, diet, and intellectual challenge. In short, says Strauch, the middle-aged mind is not in decline. It works better in many respects than it did before.
Strauch has neurological studies to back her up, which is a good thing since her anecdotal evidence is arbitrary in the extreme. The middle-agers she profiles tend to be healthy, successful, highly educated professional women a lot like her. But why be critical? In jaunty, accessible prose, Strauch brings glad tidings to a generation that never did want to grow up and longs to hear it doesn’t have to grow old.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton. 
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
