![]() ![]() ![]() Hayden’s clashes with Julie, a teaching aide whose classroom approach is distinctly at odds with hers, serve as background to this drama. ![]() Abused by her mother’s boyfriend, she is eventually hospitalized and removed to foster care. Although the girl ever so slowly comes out of her shell in the classroom, her home life rapidly deteriorates. Hayden spends every spare moment with Venus, reading children’s stories to her while the other students are at recess. With painstaking slowness, the teacher gains the child’s trust with a variety of techniques, using comic-book heroine She-Ra as a role model and crafting a cardboard “sword of power” decorated with paste jewels. When Hayden first meets Venus, the child is so silent and unresponsive that deafness and mental retardation seem possible diagnoses. The girl is one of nine children, all of whom have been in one form or another of special education and all subjected to family abuse. Hayden’s dramatic account of a single school year shows the author ( The Tiger’s Child, 1995, etc.) struggling to break through the reserve of electively mute Venus Fox. The unsettling story of a mute, nearly catatonic seven-year-old in her special-education classroom. ![]()
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