By L. B-VH
For the Love of Ann is the story of an autistic girl and the family who refused to give up hope that she would someday live a normal life.
This book is special for one reason: It contains an amazing, inspirational story of hope and perseverance.
James Copeland, a Scottish journalist, manages to take a simple diary and transform it into a book. The story of Ann Hodges and her family is presented in a way that truly pays respect to the magnitude of what they did.
This book did well impressing upon me the fact that autism was very unknown in the 1950s, as were most mental illnesses. Ann was regarded as a schizophrenic and a psychopath by her doctor, as well as uneducable.
The author did well discussing this. He did not pretend to know what the family was going through, he only stated the facts and made them interesting.
As for beautiful symbolism and expressive writing, this book is nothing special. It really doesn’t have to be. The story itself is incredible enough. The weight of the story overpowers the actual writing by far, and you really can’t blame the author for this.
It would be wrong to try to make the focus of this book the writing, when it really should be the unconditional love of this family.
Reading this book gave me a better understanding of what autism actually is. Prior to reading For the Love of Ann, I knew autism was an anti-social disease, but beyond that, it was a mystery to me.
Ann’s autism was much more severe than I could have imagined. She was very violent. The scary part is, this violence wasn’t directed outward, but inwards, towards herself.
The part of this story that I’m sure will stick with me for many years to come is what actually brought success to the family. The thought of a father forced to smack his daughter into submission is unimaginably painful.
This pain is shown in sentences such as, “Ivy served the meal, took one look at her daughter and shut herself in the kitchen, a handkerchief between her teeth to stifle her sobs as she heard Jack smacking Ann to stop her struggling.”
Yet another inspirational story can be found in the form of Ann’s younger brothers. I think the author does well to pay tribute to the huge amount of love it must have taken for those boys to give up their childhood in the hope of a life for their sister.
I can’t imagine the pain they witnessed on the faces of their parents and how much the two boys’ lives were affected by the life of their sister.
More than anything, this book forces you to ask yourself the question, if you were in that situation, would you do the same thing? Would you devote your whole life to a girl who was said to not be able to recognize you as her parents?
This young couple, with their whole lives ahead of them, made a pact to never give up on what seemed an impossible cause.
Would you do that, or would you be scared?
We all want to think that our answer would be a resounding yes, but no matter how many times I ask myself that question, I come up with the same answer. I hope.
I hope I would be as brave as Jack and Ivy Hodges. And in the end that’s all you can do. You can hope that love will pull you through when perseverance simply isn’t enough. When you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, when all you see ahead is darkness and hopelessness.
I have absolutely no regrets about reading For the Love of Ann. It informed me about the scary truth of mental illness and it inspired me to help those I can.
But most significantly, it forced me to ask myself the questions that we all hope we will never have to answer.
Would this book have been even more powerful if it had been written by one of the all time great authors? Perhaps, but we will never know, and that’s not important. This book is not meant to be a literary masterpiece, but a human masterpiece.
When you read this book, you aren’t left with words floating around in your head, but with thoughts, with feelings of pain and above all, with a sense of imperishable love.
Rating: 8.5 out of 10
While the writing may lack a “wow factor”, the story most certainly does not
The Jeffersonian 
To the Jeffersonian editors- perhaps it may be prudent to create a “desk” specifically for such things as book reviews, debate constructs, and other material not intended to be articles, but rather a very good school project published on a whim.
This book is of its time of course. It’s not a ‘how to’ manual in coping with an autistic child. If you slapped a child into submission now, you’d be locked up. But the parents did get some things right. In fact, they were heroic. The medical establishment didn’t have Ann’s best interests at heart, far from it. They advised the parents to write her off and dump her in a home. Doctors today are not always so unhelpful but they often are. In fact, their advice can be poisonous, and it’s something we have to be aware of.
The writer himself subscribed to the view that autism was a mental illness. He believed that Ann had shaken off the ‘poison’ of autism and had made a full recovery. That would now be considered impossible. It’s more likely that a combination of encouragement and fear had enabled her to present as ‘normal’, but she had undoubtedly improved tremendously.
As late as the 1980s, a book by John Cleese and Robyn Skynner subscribed to the view that autism was a traumatic reaction to bad parenting, specifically a ‘refrigerator mother.’ This can only have made parents feel worse than ever.
There’s been so much confusion, it’s no wonder parents are attracted by the hypothesis that autism is caused by vaccines. This has led to tragedy when they’ve refused to immunise their babies, and the children later died of infectious diseases.
Nowadays, autism is supposed to be a neurological disorder. I think this is probably correct, but I was a bit depressed by a short book on the subject by Simon Baron-Cohen. It gave parents the impression that there was very little hope, when perhaps they could have done with some encouragement instead. Have things improved much since Ann’s day?