Reversed: A Memoir
Lois Letchford
5/5 Stars
This book kept me so enthralled the entire time I was reading. I pretty much never read nonfiction books (I mean, just look at my Goodreads history), so I feel like that's saying something about how well this book was written. I really enjoyed the narrative structure of the story. Lois Letchford writes about her family's experience in the world of learning disabilities. It primarily focuses on her desire, determination, and passion to help her son Nicholas learn to read, which turns out to be quite the journey. She refuses to let labels like learning disabled and dyslexia put her son into a box of "things he will never be able to do." Throughout this process, she remembers and realizes just how difficult reading and writing were for her growing up too.
I have worked with students with various types of disabilities (including learning disabilities and dyslexia) for several years now and currently work in a university disability support office, so I was absolutely horrified at how some of the "counselors" and "specialists" spoke about Nicholas and his struggles. Read to the end of this story and you find out just how wrong they were! Sure, he still struggled, but he achieved big goals (way to go Nicholas!). Also, Lois never gave up, even when it was frustrating and seemed impossible. What a great display of a mother's love. This then inspired her to go on and help other students who were struggling to read, including those who had only preschool (or less) level knowledge of reading, even though they were much older. I really enjoyed getting to hear some of their stories and successes too.
I highly recommend this book for many different groups of people: teachers, guidance counselors, well anyone in education really, counselors, diagnosticians, people like me who work at college disability offices, parents of children with any type of learning disability but especially dyslexia or reading/writing based disabilities, anybody who wants their eyes opened to how everyone is different but this doesn't mean they're any less important. Don't read this is you're a Scrooge and don't want to be inspired.
I received a free copy of this book and am voluntarily leaving a review.
(Just a note, the pictures I share with each review do not belong to me. These are pictures of the cover art from the books)
