Randi Davenport's story is a testament to human fortitude, to hope, and to a mother's uncompromising love for her children. She had always worked hard to provide her family with a sense of stability and strength, despite the challenges of having a son with autism and a husband whose erratic behavior sometimes puzzled and confused her. But eventually, Randi's husband slipped into his own world and permanently out of her family's. And at fifteen, her son Chase entered an unremitting psychosis-pursued by terrifying images, unable to recognize his own mother, unwilling to eat or even talk-becoming ever more tortured and unreachable. Beautifully written and profoundly moving, this is the heartbreaking yet triumphant story of how Randi Davenport navigated the byzantine and broken health care system and managed not just to save her son from the brink of suicide but to bring him back to her again, and make her family whole. In The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes, she gives voice to the experiences of countless families whose struggles with mental illness are likewise invisible to the larger world. Randi Davenport is the author of The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes: A Mother's Story (Algonquin, 2010), a winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association Prize for Creative Non-fiction and a finalist for a Books for a Better Life award. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in publications like The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, The Ontario Review and the Alaska Quarterly Review, among others. She studied history and creative writing at William Smith College, where she earned her B.A she later earned both an MA in Creative Writing/Fiction and a PhD in literature at Syracuse University, where she won the university-wide prize for best doctoral dissertation of the year. She has been a Summer Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Public Fellow at the Institute for Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has taught literature and writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, among others. She is currently the Executive Director of the James M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "An unforgettable memoir of a shattered family, a mother's abiding love, and the frightening permutations of the human mind." --Elle "A gripping memoir of motherly love and absolute devotion." --Kirkus "This is her gripping account of that unrelenting battle. It isn't a medical thriller that climaxes with an 11th-hour cure. The light of its happy ending burns low, but in this courageous mother's eyes it shines as bright as the sun." --Boston Globe

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