Book Review
Sonny: love with no limit
by Guy Kennaway (PMensch Publishing, 2026)
Stuck in a motorway jam on a filthy rainsodden night are the author and Andrea and Maff Thompson, the latter the parents of 14-year-old Sonny, who is sitting in the back of the vehicle in his 25-stone motorised chair. An electronic beep begins. It is a warning that the battery on Sonny’s ventilator, which he depends on to stay alive, is going to run out – in seven minutes. Maff searches frantically through cases filled with Sonny’s copious equipment. It is 23 miles before the next service station and mains electricity. There is now just one minute left and still the spare battery cannot be found.
So begins this compassionate, unexpectedly comic and deeply thought-provoking book about life with Sonny, a young lad with multiple disabilities that leave him unable to move (except sometimes his eyebrows), or breathe or eat or, perhaps, even understand at the most basic level the world around him. This is his story and the story of his amazing parents and siblings, who hold him at the heart of their extraordinary family.
It is also the story of Kennaway’s own coming to terms with extreme disability, the stark, enervating realities and the hopes and beliefs that make it possible for families to keep going. He decides to tell Sonny’s story and soon establishes an ambitious project of his own – to get Sonny to see his ‘beloved’ Liverpool football team play. In the process, he sees firsthand how the Thompsons cope with the vagaries of their highly unpredictable life.
Kennaway portrays his own initial ineptitude and embarrassment in unsparing detail – his questionable jokes, his discomfort: “I never know what to say or do when I am with people like him.” “He’s called Sonny,” said Andrea. “I don’t know whether to try and talk, to just smile, to shake their hand, to bend down or to ignore them and carry on. I don’t even know whether to look at youngsters in wheelchairs when I pass them on the pavement. I mean, is that staring? What am I meant to do? So I just walk quickly by pretending not to see them.” “Not that,” she said quietly. Yet much of what Kennaway experiences and worries over will chime with most who have not had close contact with extreme disability.
Angela and Maff come across as the quite wonderful human beings they clearly are, fully and gladly focused on Sonny’s needs (mucus needs to be suctioned from his lungs every fifteen minutes, a brutal-seeming process which involves a straw, rubber tubing and pressing astoundingly hard on Sonny’s ribs, while a meal, when Sonny could still eat, might take 10 hours to spoon into him), yet somehow still leaving time and energy for their three other children’s needs as well. While the eldest child, Finn, does admit to resenting, as a child, the time and attention Sonny required (although he clearly adores him), the two younger girls just accept Sonny exactly how he is, and how their own lives are, as a result – Delilah, the youngest, was conceived in the paediatric intensive care hospital room, where Sonny once had to stay for 307 days, and Talulah learned to walk there, supported by a saline drip.
The dead hand of regulation inevitably features. After run-ins with the hospital’s ethics committee and initial refusal to allow them to take Sonny home, Angela and Maff have sworn that never again will Sonny endure a stay in a paediatric ICU. Later Kennaway discovers, when he visits Sonny’s special school with Angela, that he can’t even be shown around because he doesn’t have enhanced DBS (disclosure and barring service) clearance. Surely a quick look at where Sonny has his lessons will do no harm, he suggests to the woman physically barring his way. She will not be budged. “You have not been properly vetted,” she intones.
The family seems to have a special ability to communicate with Sonny, recognising signals and seeing reactions in his facial expression which, initially at least, seems utterly unchanging to Kennaway. Andrea is convinced Sonny knows when his birthday is – demonstrating by going through the months and enthusiastically applauding Sonny’s ‘choice’ of his own. The girls are equally sure they know Sonny’s likes and dislikes. Andrea shows a picture of Sonny sitting motionless in his chair in the reception area of his special school, declaring he is meeting and greeting and saying that he has washing up to do for his work experience. “I nodded at that out of sheer love for her and Sonny,” says Kennaway. “Quite how Sonny could tackle a pile of dirty crockery and cutlery was not explained but nor in that moment did it need to be. I was leaning into it.”
And that is a highly interesting aspect of this book. Being with this bright, positive family, Kennaway starts to absorb their beliefs, to feel that Sonny is responding to him too or emanating a certain energy. He feels able to say things to Sonny he wouldn’t say in other settings – indeed all the adults commonly say things to each other in his presence that they would not think appropriate for their other children to hear. And then he starts to wonder about what is happening here. Is Sonny really admiring the magic sunset they are seeing, as Andrea confidently announces, or is he staring sightlessly at the grass? Is this real or make believe? In his research he comes across powerful stories of others that turn him one way and then the other. And in the end, does it matter?
The story is never mawkish and is often very funny. (“I’m going to marry my bed,” says Delilah, à propos of nothing. “Good choice,” says Kennaway. “Cut out the middleman.”) It is a wonderful celebration of human resourcefulness and the power of love and meaning and purpose.
Reviewed by Denise Winn