A Screaming Kind of Day

"A Screaming Kind of Day" is an important book describing a difficult day in the life of a young girl who is physically handicapped. This, on its own, will garner attention for the book, but Rachna Gilmore goes a step farther than the usual depiction of physical disabilities and points out that Scully, a hearing impaired child, is behaving alike any child her age. Her characters are au courant, and include a mother who is surrounded by books (is she studying for her degree, doing post-graduate work, working at home?), a brother, Leo, for just the right amount of tension in the story and a father, whose help and support are mentioned just once. The need for and use of hearing aids is secondary to Scully's relationship with her family, especially her brother and mother, although she uses the ease of turning off or removing her hearing aids to help her get her way. As do most siblings, Scully and Leo have the ability to cause each other exquisite torture in their daily lives.Scully is aware of the pressure her mother is under, how tired she feels, how tense she becomes in reaction to the behaviour of both children, but she has an "it goes with the job" attitude toward her mother's condition. Many children have just this attitude, although current psychological theory and social custom deny this, as they deny consequential behaviour. Scully, however, experiences definite consequences to her actions.Nature plays an important role in Scully's life. Partly because her disability is deafness, the feel of rain and the sight of stars in the night sky are crucial to her. The story implies that this is a legacy from Scully's mother. Indeed, we get the feeling that their love of nature will help to see the family through difficult times all through their lives.In the end, of course, all rivalries and frustrations are smoothed out and the family calms down as night falls.The use of the name Scully recalls decades of children given names made popular by television and films.The illustrations are wonderfully full blown and tactile to the eye. Gordon Sauve is an artist who not only is experienced in portraiture, but knows the story and knows family life. The variety of vantage points from which he illustrates the activity of the children enhances the rhythm of the story. His choice of positioning Scully's hands during the rain scene on page 18 leads us to imagine the natural extension of her embryonic movement upward into a prayer (at some point later in her life), gathering the rain, and perhaps the earth, into herself.If I have any criticism of this book, it is that Dad appears in one scene only, at dinner, where he supports Scully by giving her a friendly wink. The author, through Scully, mentions that he has made a delicious tomato sauce that is used for the family dinner. He does not join Scully, Leo and their mother in the back yard to watch night fall and the stars appear, perhaps because the author wishes