by Jean-Charles Soucy

Of Granite and Tigers is an insightful, candid, autobiographical sketch of a family's coping with the birth and rearing of a severely retarded, Down syndrome child. Soucy describes the developing relationship that he and his wife Lorraine have with their son Thomas throughout childhood, adolescence and adulthood. This work is a rare view into a family's coping with a child with mental retardation as well as with the disruptive consequences of sustained opposition, Tourette's disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder. Soucy spares the too-frequent sentimentality that can accompany such descriptions of the parenting of disabled children. Instead, he embraces a reality-based approach that ranges from heartbreak, to frustration, and to the basic needs to survive as a parent in order to insure the survival of a couple's intellectually impaired child. The author does not mince words about the ambivalence, discouragement, sacrifice, and pride that accompany the parents' twenty-eight-year relationship with their son. The parental relationship is characterized in shades of grey, ambivalence, annoyance, pressure, anxiety, foreboding, as well as by love, success, and unique friendship between parents and their adult son. This book is a welcome addition to a genre of writing that combines autobiographical as well as biographical perspectives in a deeply personal sketch about parental experiences with a truly disabled twenty-eight-year-old man called Thomas.