Books of October

I only read two books in October.  My excuse:  they were both very long.

Cora Seaborne is a recent widow who is delighted to be free of her abusive husband.  She is persuaded by friends to visit a village by the sea (This story takes place in England.)  There she finds a small town frightened by the idea that a huge sea serpent is coming to terrorize them.  We meet a huge cast of characters:  Frankie, Cora's son, who probably has Asperger's;

Martha, his nanny and Cora's companion; a doctor who is referred to as the Imp; the man he saves, the village pastor and his dying wife and their three children, and many other characters.  All of them are intertwined in some way and all have some sort of connection to the serpent.  Is there really a serpent?  You won't find out until the last pages.  Meanwhile, the book focuses on other themes:  housing for poverty-stricken Londoners, medical advances, fossils and other things.  I gave it a B.

I found this book fascinating.  I've worked with autistic children and I'm aware of some of the history covered in this book, but I loved the readable style, the clarity of the explanations, and although it's over 500 pages, I finished it in about 10 days.  It covers the era of institutionalizing children who were "different" and "difficult," the early identification of  children with autism, the struggles of parents to raise their children and to find appropriate education for them, the idea prevalent in the mid-20th century that autism was caused by "refrigerator mothers" who rejected their children, the activism by parent organizations, the different methods of working with autistic children, the changing of diagnostic criteria, the vaccine scare, the views of autistic adults, and more.  This is great reading for a lay person or a professional.