He Never Liked Cake

On a balmy Tuesday during the summer before ninth grade, a car accident on a rain-slicked highway flipped Janna’s safe and happy world upside down, and her adolescence dissolved into a summer of restraining belts, feeding tubes, therapy schedules, and chicken salad sandwiches from the hospital cafeteria. Since that day, Janna’s life has been a navigation through the inescapable struggles of her father’s brain injury, a study of her mother’s resilience and unconditional love, an a challenge to find her own identity and acceptance as an adult. Brain injury is insidious. It’s tricky and tiresome. For those asked to love and support a TBI survivor, the struggles are deeply personal and often unresolved, and the victim’s recovery is repeatedly thwarted by insurmountable obstacles, along with the battles fought with insurance companies for proper patient care and effective treatment. Janna Leyde’s coming-of-age memoir encompasses the acute and lasting effects of brain injury on both survivors and their loved ones. He Never Liked Cake is for children who feel the weight of life crashing down, for families who fight for the new normal, for survivors who fail to see how life has changed—and, for everyone, this is a story about how to embrace life when it doesn’t work out the way we had it planned.