The Doctor's Secret Child

Three sisters and mom live and work together at Hopewell Vineyards, after dad did them all wrong and ran off with someone else. In a somewhat confusing twist, the other woman had a baby, who sister Carolyn raises as her little brother (dad and the other woman are both dead, if I recall correctly). However, young Jamie is not Carolyn's brother after all, as his biological father turns out to be the ex-husband of the other woman (which I don't get exactly - how fast did she leave the one for the other?). When Dr. Trey Westerly discovers he's a dad, he's ready to burst on the scene and insert himself into the family. Here's where it caught my interest - Jamie has Sensory Integration Dysfunction (sometimes called Sensory Integration Impairment), a little-understood condition which gets lumped under the autism umbrella (which it's not). Kids with SID/SII (largely boys) lack the ability to integrate all five senses and process their reactions to things like sound, texture and social situations, among other things. So Jamie doesn't take too well to new dad Trey's bursting in (I think he climbs up a tree and yells or something like that) and Trey doesn't trust Carolyn and her family's care and choices for Jamie, because he knows nothing about SID/SII. Complicating matters is Trey's snooty, over-controlling mother, who tries to put Jamie in a limosine, a suit and a fancy apartment. When Trey starts recogizing some of his own childhood behaviors and reactions in Jamie, he wises up, educates himself, becomes a halfway decent dad and falls in love with Carolyn along the way (and yes, they get married). As a romance novel, it's middle of the road, but the fact that author Kate Welsh took a risk and inserted a character with a lesser known but very challenging disability makes up for that. She portrays Jamie's SID/SII fairly accurately, which tells me she did her homework (impressive, since there's not a lot out there on the subject). Know a harried mom with an SID/SII kid? Send her a copy of this book and tell her to take some time for herself. That's what I did, and the recipient got a kick out of it.