Images and Echoes: An Odyssey of Hope by Bianca Covelli Stewart, Hardcover

Wear to corners of dust jacket. No markings. Pages are bright and clean. No tanning.

Although this book deals with a somber subject--a ten-year old's loss of sight--it is replete with faith, optimism, and humor. The slant is unique in that the first nine chapters are narrated from a child's visual viewpoint, while the rest shift to a narration from the girl's remaining senses.
 

In these pages we participate in the drama of the author being struck down by a nearly fatal illness from which she emerges totally and permanently blind. We share her struggle for adaptation to her newly darkened world, including a year in a tuberculosis sanitarium and a stint in a school for blind children. We triumph as she meets new challenges--riding a horse, driving a car, shooting a rifle, sailing a boat, and traveling in the United States and Europe with a guide dog. The book also describes her attending college, highlighted by an award from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, teaching high school, meeting her husband, and, despite the physicians' predictions that she could never bear children, giving birth to five.
 

Vignettes springing from situations brought on by her blindness are amusing and enlightening. Readers will come away with a keener appreciation for the indomitable nature of the human spirit and a better understanding of the author's world and of their own.