The Horse Boy: A Memoir of Healing [Paperback]

Excellent account of how much parents love their children in general and how far parents will go to try to help children with special needs. All the while, these parent maintain a very realistic perspective. Compelling reading.

Horse Boy is informative, exciting, and a flowing read. I have a son with autism, and I could relate to the daily strange circumstances a family is in with autism! I especially liked the combination of humor and "tragic" reality. I can't wait for my bookclub to discuss it!

This is a story of a father who literally went to the ends of the earth to be able to manage his son's serious case of autism. At 350 pages in paperback, it is twice as long as it needed to be, because the author doesn't neglect to describe every rock and stone they pass on their journey. He never saw a sunrise or sunset that he could not rhapsodize floridly about for at least a paragraph.

Every five pages or so the author stopped to ask himself rhetorical questions about himself, his mission, if he was doing the right thing by his boy, and other questions about himself and himself and himself and who was he? And what did this all mean about him?

The book is endlessly self-reflective and filled with inessential information such as the pet name the author and his wife gave their child, the half-serious, half-clownish "Code Brown" drill they went through whenever the child pooped in his pants, and lengthy descriptions about the contents of various saddlebags and autistic-breakdown emergency kits.

If the book had been 150 pages fewer, it would have been a very good narrative, but the author loved to hear himself think and write about what he thought, soaring into Tennysonian heights: "Ring out glad bells!"

I can't imagine the difficulty of anyone raising an autistic child and how it damages marital relationships and makes your relatives never want to visit you. I salute the author and his wife for how they handled what they underwent with their son and how many aggregate hours of their lives they spent in a desperate and loving and eventually successful attempt to manage their son's autism. I only wish the book had been more centered on the child than on the heroic actions and stature of the father.

The author is an excellent writer. It would have been interesting to see him write about his son through his son's eyes, like Benjy in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (Norton Critical Editions). It would also have gotten himself off the topic of who he was, why this happened to him, was this a quixotic quest? Why did he hate milk and eggs? Was he the most lovingest darn dad the world has ever seen? How many photos of himself with his long, flowing hair could he include in the book without looking like an absolute narcissist?

So take out the perpetual overlay of self-reflection, the minutiae of every single action that every single shaman performed on his son, and the long, inessential description of everything that caught his eye, and you have a decent book on a harrowing subject.