My Thirteenth Winter: A Memoir - Hardcover

Abeel, Samantha

3.69

1,191 ratings by Goodreads

9780439339049: My Thirteenth Winter: A Memoir

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0439339049 ISBN 13: 9780439339049

Publisher: Orchard, 2003

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In this beautiful and chilling memoir, twenty-four-year-old Samantha Abeel describes living with dyscalculia, a math-related learning disability.

Samantha Abeel tells her own story of living with and overcoming dyscalculia. She describes in painstaking detail how her life was affected by her learning disability before and after she was diagnosed, and the way her peers, her family, and her teachers treated her.
In seventh grade, Samantha suffered anxiety attacks as she struggled to keep up in her classes, to remember two locker combinations, and to deal with new teachers. Samantha was eventually placed in Special Education classes in eighth grade, but she continued to feel anxious about her future.

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About the Author:

Samantha Abeel was a gifted child who excelled at language arts, yet she often had trouble with seemingly simple math problems. In her seventh-grade creative writing class, Samantha found refuge from the endless classes focused on math, measurements and algebra. When her parents enlisted the aid of an English teacher to help Samantha focus on her strength by creating writing assignments to be critiqued, she began the project that would become her first book, Reach for the Moon.

From School Library Journal:

Grade 9 Up--Abeel writes of her torturous year in seventh grade when she was diagnosed with a learning disability. Having been a gifted, creative preschooler, she was not prepared for the realization, in second grade, that she could not do many of the tasks that her classmates could accomplish with ease. By seventh grade, her feelings of insecurity had reached an all-time high, and she began to experience anxiety attacks over everything from having to remember her locker combination to managing her schoolwork to staying overnight at a friend's. When she was finally diagnosed with dyscalculia, she and her family felt relief. At least now there was a name for her difficulties and strategies she could employ. This account is an interesting mix of factual information and memories. Abeel relates her experiences with detached clarity, but each situation is followed by the thoughts and feelings that finally forced her to face her differences. Occasionally, her well-phrased prose slips into clich�, and when she lists the math skills that she could not perform she becomes rather pedantic. While this book is not likely to be of great interest to casual readers, those with similar learning issues will identify strongly with the author's trials and triumphs. Pair this title with Abeel's book of poetry, Reach for the Moon (Scholastic, 2001), to inspire young people with learning disabilities and to educate others.--Nancy Menaldi-Scanlan, LaSalle Academy, Providence, RI
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