Shape of the Eye (Estreich) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
The moving, heartbreakingly lucid story about how a family learned to cope with, and ultimately appreciate, a daughter born with Down syndrome. Neither [ Estreich nor his wife] was prepared for the news that the baby girl they would name Laura had Trisomy 21, Down syndrome. Both were devastated; but for the author, the diagnosis had even more profound implications.... With the humility born of painful experience, Estreich concludes that "it is not the chromosome, but our response to it, that shapes the contour of a life." A poignantly eloquent meditation on the genetics of belonging.
Kirkus Reviews


The Shape of the Eye is a memoir of a father’s love for his daughter, his struggle to understand her disability, and his journey toward embracing her power and depth.  Estreich is raw and honest and draws us each into a new view of what it means to be 'human’ and what it means to be ‘different.’  This book is beautifully written, poetically insightful, and personally transformative. To read it is to rethink everything and to be happy because of the journey.
Timothy P. Shriver, Ph.D. -  Chairman & CEO of the Special Olympics


The Shape of the Eye personalizes Down syndrome, bringing a condition abstracted in the medical literature into the full dimensionality of one family's life. It's brave of George Estreich to make what has befallen his family so public, trusting of him to let an unknown audience second-guess the family's choices. Because he's opened his home and heart in this memoir, we are privileged to witness in chaotic, heart-wrenching, joyous detail what it means to have and to love a child with Down syndrome.
Marcia Childress - Associate Professor of Medical Education, University of Virginia School of Medicine