From the Atlanta Journal Constitution:
By Gina Webb
For the AJC
Sleep in Me by Jon Pineda, University of Nebraska Press, 168 pages, $21.95.
When Jon Pineda was 11 years old, his 16-year-old sister, Rica, was in a car crash en route to Nags Head, N.C. After months in a coma, she woke, half her body paralyzed. She would spend the rest of her short life in a wheelchair, never able to walk or talk again.
Sleep in Me is Pineda’s graceful, elegiac account of that period. Part coming-of-age story, part remembrance, it chronicles his attempt to discover what pieces were left of his older sister -- her humor, her dreams, her dignity -- when she could communicate only through rudimentary sign language.
“She used it to tell us she was still here,” her brother writes. But whether Pineda was still “here,” and who he became after Rica’s accident, are at the heart of this inquiry into the nature of consciousness, silence and language.
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