By Henry Ehrlich
If you don’t have a local food-allergy support group, and even if you do, I highly recommend How to Manage Your Child’s Life-Threatening Food Allergies: Practical Tips for Everyday Life by Linda Coss, who learned food allergies from scratch, starting, naturally, with her own child’s issues, and never forgot a thing. Fortunately, she wrote it all down for everyone else. Take the full tour, from the initial symptoms and diagnosis to treatment to cooking to dealing with schools to arming your children with the knowledge and confidence to make their own way in the world. Oh yes, and how to found your own support group. How to Manage… is a disciplined book, written by someone who has had to reconcile her passion for her child’s health with the schedule of a working mother (day job: freelance marketing writer, which serves her well in the tight, punchy prose). The “how-to” quality is leavened by the real-life examples on almost every topic throughout the nearly 200 pages of text, plus forms for every conceivable bureaucratic encounter.
I couldn’t write a book like this. I’m glad someone did. Read it straight through for the big picture, and consult it as questions arise.