Twilight Children
Three Voices No One Heard – Until Someone Listened
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the phenomenal Sunday Times bestsellers ‘One Child’ and ‘Ghost Girl’, comes a startling and poignant memoir of three people's victimisation and abuse – and their heartbreaking but ultimately successful steps to recovery, with the help of Torey Hayden, an extraordinary teacher.
Two children trapped in a prison of silence and a woman suffering in the twilight of her years – these are the cases that would test the extraordinary courage, compassion and skill of Torey Hayden and ultimately reaffirm her faith in the indomitable strength of the human spirit.
While working in the children’s psychiatric ward of a large hospital, Torey was introduced to seven-year-old Cassandra, a child who had been kidnapped by her father and was found dirty, starving and picking though rubbish bins to survive. She refused to speak, so Torey could only imagine what she’d been through. Drake, by contrast, was a charismatic four-year-old who managed to participate fully in his pre-school class without uttering a single word. Then, there was Gerda, eighty-two, who had suffered a massive stroke and was unwilling to engage in conversation with anyone. Although Torey had never worked with adults, she agreed to help when all other efforts had failed.
Reviews
‘Torey Hayden deserves the kind of respect I can’t give many people. She isn’t valuable, she’s incredible. The world needs more like Torey Hayden.’ – Boston Globe
About the author
Born in Montana, USA, Torey Hayden has spent most of her adult life working with children in distress. Now living in Great Britain, she divides her time between writing and volunteer work with several British charities. Torey is author of numerous internationally best-selling books about her experiences as a special education teacher and therapist. She has also written two novels and two children's books.
Find her at www.torey-hayden.com
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hayden was working as a special ed teacher and needed a break. With her psychiatric training and specialization in "elective mutism," she was cajoled into working for a hospital-based psychiatric crisis and assessment unit. She begins this book with the story of a girl who was only six when she was abducted by her father; returned to her home two years later, she alternated long stretches of silence with lying and sexual accusations. Hayden was then asked to assess a delightful preschool boy whose voice no one had ever heard except his mother; his belligerent grandfather ordered Hayden to "fix" the boy's problem. Then she was called to observe an elderly woman who'd had a stroke that may have rendered her unable to speak. Gradually, the woman began to recount girlhood memories to Hayden who thus knew she was still lucid but would that satisfy the doctors who wanted to send her to a nursing home? Each case unfolds like a detective story, with Hayden piecing together the mystery of the silences from the various clues she gleans. Besides being a delightful raconteur, Hayden is also a very gentle, very sensible therapist. Yes, her patient is dissociating, but that's normal, we all do it the real question is, "at what point on the continuum does it move from being resourceful and helpful to maladaptive and damaging?" This is a compulsively readable book.
