This Boy We Made - Taylor Harris

This Boy We Made

By Taylor Harris

  • Release Date: 2022-01-11
  • Genre: Biographies & Memoirs
Score: 4
4
From 15 Ratings

Description

Winner of the Clara Johnson Award
Hurston Wright Legacy Award Nominee
Finalist for the Library of Virginia's Literary Awards
Finalist for the 2023 Southern Book Prize

A Black mother bumps up against the limits of everything she thought she believed—about science and medicine, about motherhood, and about her faith—in search of the truth about her son.


One morning, Tophs, Taylor Harris’s round-cheeked, lively twenty-two-month-old, wakes up listless, only lifting his head to gulp down water. She rushes Tophs to the doctor, ignoring the part of herself, trained by years of therapy for generalized anxiety disorder, that tries to whisper that she’s overreacting. But at the hospital, her maternal instincts are confirmed: something is wrong with her boy, and Taylor’s life will never be the same.

With every question the doctors answer about Tophs’s increasingly troubling symptoms, more arise, and Taylor dives into the search for a diagnosis. She spends countless hours trying to navigate health and education systems that can be hostile to Black mothers and children; at night she googles, prays, and interrogates her every action.

Some days, her sweet, charismatic boy seems just fine; others, he struggles to answer simple questions. A long-awaited appointment with a geneticist ultimately reveals nothing about what’s causing Tophs’s drops in blood sugar, his processing delays—but it does reveal something unexpected about Taylor’s own health. What if her son’s challenges have saved her life?

This Boy We Made is a stirring and radiantly written examination of the bond between mother and child, full of hard-won insights about fighting for and finding meaning when nothing goes as expected.

Reviews

  • Stunning and beautiful

    5
    By scooper1924
    I’ve never before felt moved to write a review of any book I’ve read. But this book is beautiful. There are some passages that are so stunning and heartfelt that I stopped and re-read them again, hoping to commit them to memory. As a mother and grandmother, I know that I am drawn to stories about mothers and their children, often dealing with difficult circumstances. But her writing is so subtle and yet impactful that this book stands above the rest. Most importantly, she opened my eyes to the fact that racism exists even in the places you wouldn’t suspect. I was naive, and I’m grateful to her for opening my eyes. I wish her and her family good health and peace of mind. Do not miss reading this book.

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