Years ago when it came out I read Riding the Bus with My Sister by Rachel Simon; it's a memoir about the year she spent with her Down Syndrome sister as adults, and was a very good read. (They made a Hallmark movie out of the book which - no real surprise - wasn't nearly as good.)
In fact, here's my favorite bookmark:
Now I've just finished another book by Rachel Simon, which I found to be excellent: The Story of Beautiful Girl. This novel, told from several vantage points, takes place over 40 years, and chronicles the changes in the way physically and mentally challenged individuals are treated.
"This tender novel opens on a rainy night in 1968, when an urgent knock draws retired teacher Martha Zimmer to her farmhouse door. She opens it to find a trio of unexpected guests: a deaf man, a developmentally disabled woman, and a newborn baby girl. She offers them shelter, but within hours, staffers from the nearby School for the Incurable and Feebleminded have tracked down the couple. The workers don't know about the baby, and as they bundle the new mother, Lynnie, into a straitjacket, she looks at Martha and whispers two desperate words: "Hide her." In that instant, a secret is born, one to which Martha, Lynnie, and the deaf man, Homan, will devote their lives. By turns heartbreaking and heartwarming, The Story of Beautiful Girl follows these remarkable people along their disparate paths for more than forty years, until a series of fateful events finally draws them together again."
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