Book Review: Someday I'll Be Well

A Fair Trade Book (Hurrah!)



Title: Someday I’ll Be Well

Author: Gail Linam

Date: 1982

Publisher: Southern Baptist Convention

ISBN: none

Length: 33 pages

Illustrations: drawings by David Durham

Quote: “Months ago Sundar had fallen. He had hurt his arm badly.”

Doctors at the Bangalore Baptist Hospital may be able to help, so Sundar and his father “crawled into the family oxcart for the long trip to Bangalore.” When they get there the little boy is shown around the hospital. Then we leave him waiting to have his arm set, with the assurance that “his dream came true”—he recovered the use of his arm—after the time frame of the story.

As a Sunday School book for primary school children this is one of the genre some people find most annoying—the ones written for the purpose of persuading little children to put their pennies into collections for various church projects. As long as the money collected really does go to institutions like the Bangalore Baptist Hospital, and evidently it did, I suppose fundraising storybooks are legitimate. The question may be whether they succeed as picture books.

Pictures are the main attraction in a picture book, and I have to mark Someday I’ll Be Well down for containing too many drawings of faces and not enough of its exotic setting. Children get information from the pictures in a picture book. If the purpose of this book is to tell them about the Bangalore Baptist Hospital, and all the pictures give them is yet another view of what a fictional character’s face is supposed to look like...who cares what a fictional character looks like? He's fiction! Of course smiling doctors are more fun to look at than autoclaves or traction frames, and the amount of scenery a patient sees from a hospital bed may be limited, but Durham really owed the child reader more than all these faces.

As an historical document, this book is still valuable. Yes, children, there really was a Bangalore Baptist Hospital. There still is. You can see pictures of the hospital as it is now, and compare them with those drawings of the way it was in 1982, at

http://www.bbh.org.in/

And the book is completely out of print...collector prices may apply! Since Gail Linam is alive and well, according to the Internet, still a Provost at the Dallas Baptist University and having recently celebrated her golden wedding anniversary, I'd like to offer Someday I'll Be Well as a Fair Trade Book, but it's not currently available through Amazon. The copy I physically own is intact, but showing too much wear to meet Amazon's standards. I don't know whether I can offer it as a Fair Trade Book, nor what the price will be, by the time you order it. E-mail salolianigodagewi @ yahoo and we'll discuss that then.