From the dust jacket:
Melissa Comes Home tells the story of the founding of Melmark Home, the “home that love built.” Through the birth of their mongoloid daughter, Melissa, the Krentels and their teen-aged children are introduced into the heartbreaking world of the handicapped. They find themselves with a deep desire to provide for her and other children like her the special care and training that they need. Through the dynamics of a dream and miraculous provisions, on May 27, 1966, they move into a thirty-five room chateau with twenty acres of rolling country-side. Now, six years later, they have over 130 resident children and a staff of over 110.
Melissa Comes Home verbally unwraps the heartwarming incidents from little Melissa’s birth leading up to the home’s beginning.
But more than this, it reaches out to touch the aching hearts of families with handicapped children, to show another way of handling an agonizing problem, and to strip away the stigma of “putting your child away.” To those who have not experienced living with abnormal children, Melissa presents an invigorating challenge, the inspiration to endure, to help the helpless, to love the unlovely, and to rise above the revulsions induced by an abnormality in others.
