From the time she learned to speak via finger-spelling, Helen Keller--blind and deaf since she was a toddler--was regarded as a miracle. Her hunger for learning and tireless work ethic made her famous; her gifts to charity made her beloved. Until she hired Peter Fagan as her private secretary in 1916, no one expected her to fall in love.
Debut novelist Rosie Sultan's Helen Keller in Love spins a tale of forbidden love, invoking scents, textures and tastes on every page to show how Helen "saw" the world. She grounds the story in well-known incidents from Helen's childhood, but draws on later biographies, speeches and letters to show Helen as a woman, intelligent and determined but forced by her handicaps to be dependent on her family and employees.
Contrary to its title, the book revolves around Helen and her teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy, who have spent their lives together and know each other so well. Both women are well-drawn, while Peter Fagan is an unsettling shadow, almost two-dimensional. But Sultan skillfully expresses Helen's main frustrations: at the public for refusing to take her seriously when she speaks on political issues unrelated to blindness, and at her family and friends for refusing to see her as a grown woman, with a woman's desires. Helen Keller in Love holds readers' attention with a fresh depiction of a woman famous for overcoming her physical handicaps, forced to fight for her right to love. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams