Reading this biographical novel, narrated by Anne Sullivan and
based on her many letters, I was reminded once again why I, like
so many others, have always been captivated by the story of Anne
and Helen Keller, the little girl whose life she transformed. It
starts in 1887 with 20-year-old Anne on the train to Alabama to
meet her new student. Anne's thoughts drift back to her own
traumatic childhood as a blind orphan living at Tewksbury, the
Massachusetts state almshouse, losing her beloved little
brother, Jimmy, and finally finding acceptance and training at
the Perkins Institution for the Blind. Upon meeting her new
pupil, the blind and deaf six-year-old Helen, Annie muses, "She
seems so utterly alone, her look so familiar, for a moment I
imagine I'm seeing the shadow of my own child-soul." Love-
starved Annie is every bit as emotionally needy as her charge.
Soon, though, the two are locked in battle over Helen's
appalling mealtime behavior as Annie struggles to teach the wild
child some manners, how to finge