Crossed Signals
by Caroline Courey

Available from $19.95, new and used, at Amazon.com (See link below)

Reviewed by DeanOP
MSWorld Book Reviewer



When I find myself arguing in my mind with the characters in a novel I'm reading I know I'm lost in the author's world— deeply enough engaged that the characters have become so real as to warrant my disagreeing with them. Such was the case for me while reading Ms. Courey's novel about a family in which the mother is diagnosed with MS. I couldn't put the book down and finished it in two all-too-swift sittings.

Much of this story is written from the points of view of the teenaged daughter (Melanie) and her recently diagnosed mother (Grace), though the father and two sons are also very well and sensitively written. The story tells of the struggles of each family member as he/she comes to terms with the fact of the mother's having MS. And it is a really good story— powerful, unconventionally told, arresting. It would be a good story even if I didn't have MS because it's a story about people in families and how they do and don't communicate during times of stress. The descriptions of MS and its symptoms as they affect Grace are completely accurate and are neither dryly clinical nor unnecessarily graphic. The family members' experiences, how each does and does not manage to heal, all are presented unsentimentally. Both the parents' and the children's difficulties and reactions are all realistic. It is an honest story.

This is particularly important because Ms. Courey wrote the book so that young adults might better understand their own responses to a parent's chronic illness. Herself single mother of four who has MS, Ms. Courey is currently campaigning to have the book as required reading in the curriculum of the Montreal school district where she lives and where she runs empowerment workshops for MS-sufferers. I am nothing like a young adult, though I do read a lot of "young adult" literature. Given the subject, this book is as well-written and gripping as any novel out there. And it's a novel! How wonderful to encounter a book in which a main character has MS, and in which MS is, partly, the subject of the story! Frankly, I'd recommend it as required reading for anyone involved with someone who has MS, young adult or not. I am awfully glad to have read this book. My thanks to Ms. Courey for sending it my way.

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