Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio

Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio, by Peg Kehret, is a memoir she wrote about her personal struggle as a twelve-year-old girl diagnosed with three different kinds of polio. She describes her journey dealing with this infectious disease, and what was done for patients before the polio vaccine was developed. Her slow recovery takes her away from her parents, to hospital rooms, and allows her to befriend other children trying to survive with the same disease.

This was SUCH a fantastic book! It was an unbelievable story to experience it though her own eyes, as she described it chronologically when she first collapsed at school. Her thoughts, her fears, and her joys were all mixed together into a descriptive picture of what it would be like to be a teenage girl who becomes paralyzed. This story contains humor, science, music, teamwork, loyalty, healing, redemption, and most of all, hope. Hope that peg will walk again, hope that she'll reconnect with her friends at school, and hope that she will even survive at all. I always love books that remind me that life is precious and worth living to the fullest!


--Mr. Riedl
2017-01-15