Welcome to Book Angel Booktopia’s stop on the By Any Other Name Blog Tour. Prepare for your heart to be squeezed with Holly’s words of love to her sister Katie.
Dear Katie,
You’ll never be able to read this so why am I writing it down? Maybe so I don’t ever forget, because one thing I have learned is that when you change it’s easy to lose exactly how you felt at a certain moment in time, and I don’t want to forget how we are now.
When you were born, we all thought you were perfect. And then we found out you weren’t. Mum did a lot of crying – I remember that. So did Dad, he just didn’t let us see him. Me, I didn’t really understand what autism meant then. Just that you were different and it didn’t seem to matter – you were the same cute toddler you’d always been. It was only later when I saw how other people looked at you that I started to see why.
It doesn’t matter though. That’s what I wanted to say, I guess, in this stupid, stumbling way where the words won’t come out right. It’s Katie we love – me and Mum and Dad. We love you as much as we would if you hadn’t this condition…disability…whatever people want to call it. To us, you are and will always be perfect because you’re you – my sister, who can recite the names of all the constellations, who knows what every car on the road is from their shapes, who has to eat her food in a certain order, who still calls me Boo-boo. You are perfect as you are.
Love forever,
Your big sister
xoxoxoxox
Image from Publisher Website
Title: By Any Other Name
Author: Laura Jarratt
Publisher: Electric Monkey
Publication Date: 1 April 2013
Synopsis from Amazon
Nobody can know the truth – her life depends on it. I picked up the book and thumbed through the pages. Names in alphabetical order, names with meanings, names I knew, names I’d never heard of. How to pick? Nothing that would stand out, nothing that would link me to the past – those were the instructions. The past. As if everything that had gone before this moment was buried already. Holly is fifteen years old, but she’s only been “Holly” for a matter of months. Because of something that happened, she and her family have had to enter witness protection and have all assumed new identities. All, that is, except her sister Katie, who is autistic. Starting at a new school mid-term is hard enough at the best of times, and Holly has no clue who she is any more. Lonely and angry, she reaches out to friends – new and old. But one wrong move will put all their lives in danger…
