Golem Girl

Artist, writer, and person living from birth into her seventh decade in what she terms a "socially challenged body," Riva Lehrer proves to be an engaging memoirist and a clear-voiced narrator with an excellent sense of pacing. Spina bifida has characterized her body without serving as the sole focus of either her own or her family's life. She moves us from her difficult birth through a childhood and adolescence of discovering both her physical and intellectual capacities, drawing listeners into reconsidering cultural assumptions and the need for each of us to locate social identity. More than an hour at the end of the memoir is given to an equally satisfying program in which narrator Cassandra Campbell delivers text written by Briana Beck that gives listeners what she calls "verbal interpretations of the visual images included in the printed book." F.M.R.G. � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine