March and Brain Injury Awareness

March is Brain Injury Awareness month.  It is not a very cheery topic, but it is an important one – one that we often don’t understand well.

Books often give us insights into a character’s emotions which can help us understand our own feelings as well as the feelings of those around us.  Young adults are at the point in their lives when the world widens to new situations and challenges.  I wondered how books in our Young Adult (YA) section deal with the tough issue of brain injury.  I discovered two which handle the issue from totally different perspectives.

Patricia McCormick is a former journalist who is known for her compassionate handling of tough issues.  As part of her research for Purple Heart (YA  Mc Cormick), she interviewed soldiers who went to Iraq and families of soldiers who never returned from Iraq.  She went to a demonstration where there was a pair of boots for every soldier who had died in Iraq and shoes for all the civilians whose lives had also been lost in the war.  Among the shoes was a pair of little boy’s sneakers.  This moving sight was inspiration for the story of Private Matt Duffy.

Matt, a young soldier just eighteen years old, wakes up in a military hospital in the Green Zone of Baghdad.  His medical chart indicates that he has “probable TBI” or Traumatic Brain Injury.  Matt doesn’t really know what that means.  He just knows that his head hurts and thoughts get very fuzzy.  He has dreams and flashes of memories, but things don’t fit together right.  He remembers that he and his partner went into an alley in pursuit and are caught in a gun fight.  A little boy that Matt had befriended stood at the end of the alley until he is lifted off the ground by a shot.  The sight of his shoes in the air haunts Matt. But Matt discovers that things are not always as they appear.  McCormick presents the struggle to understand war with all its facets.

Back Home (YA Keller) by Julia Keller is told from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old girl, Rachel “Brownie” Browning, whose father returns from the war in Iraq with significant injuries to both his body and his brain.  She feels that she no longer knows this person who just sits in the living room day after day unable to communicate with her.  Brownie’s mother explains that because of his brain injury, her father especially needs her affection and patience.  She tries, but Brownie wonders if her family will ever be the same.  It is hard to imagine what that must be like, but the reader certainly feels the emotions of this young girl.