Review: Joan Ryan's 'The Water Giver: The Story of a Mother, a Son, and Their Second Chance'

No baby comes with instructions, but for Joan Ryan motherhood was a struggle almost from the first.

Her son, Ryan, adopted as a newborn, was always a conundrum — sweet and charming one moment, aggressive and defiant the next. He was diagnosed with a textbook's worth of learning and behavioral disabilities, and she spent enormous energy trying to "fix" him.

At 16, he was big, handsome boy about to start his sophomore year of high school. He walked out the door one day in 2006 with his skateboard — and without a helmet. And the whole world changed.

Joan Ryan, a sportswriter and author (Little Girls in Pretty Boxes and Shooting From the Outside) who will be a featured author at the Times Festival of Reading on Oct. 24, writes about her son's devastating accident and its aftermath in The Water Giver: The Story of a Mother, a Son, and Their Second Chance.

Falling from his skateboard at the bottom of a steep hill, the boy suffered a traumatic brain injury so severe doctors had to remove most of the top of his skull because of brain swelling.

He spent days in a medically induced coma, a month in intensive care and two more months in other hospitals. Even now, a high school graduate three years later, he struggles with the lasting effects of his injuries.

Most of The Water Giver focuses on the months immediately after the accident, when the rounds of new medical crises, surgeries, medications and rehab completely absorbed the lives of his mother and his father, Fox Sports commentator Barry Tompkins.

"We were beginning to understand how different the rhythm of illness was from the rhythm of life," Joan Ryan writes, "especially now that the adrenaline of the first few weeks had disappeared. Nothing about the journey was linear."

She recounts that journey in The Water Giver with both a reporter's clarity and a mother's love. Her journalist's training served her well in many ways as she grappled with understanding her son's injuries and treatment — and coping with the medical industry. She knew how to do research and track down people who could give her answers, and that focus on work she's good at keeps her from breaking down — most of the time.

But her son's plight is hardly just another story. The Water Giver is also rich with accounts of the vast amount of help and support the family received from friends, medical staff and strangers.

And it is, most of all, a moving story of the never perfect but deep, abiding love between a mother and son. One of the signs of Ryan's recovery his mother treasures most is the return of his sense of humor, when he painstakingly writes to her on a whiteboard, "I love you, but you are a pain in the butt."

Colette Bancroft can be reached at cbancroft@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8435. She blogs on Critics Circle at blogs.tampabay.com/arts.