Happiness Falls

This book promotes methods of nonverbal communication known as “Rapid Prompt Method” or “Spelling to Communicate”. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's official position is that “use of the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) is not recommended because of prompt dependency and the lack of scientific validity”. There just isn't any evidence that it's actually the individuals and not the facilitators doing the communicating (see: ideomotor effect). Now there are certainly some people that have trouble with speech and can communicate in other ways, but the case of Eugene in the book going from essentially zero communication to complex sentences and writing poetry is too fantastical to believe. I kept expecting the book to have some twist that actually no, it wasn't him, but sadly that wasn't the conclusion. There are some obvious red flags with these methods, e.g. why does it require a human to hold the letterboard vs. just having it stationary? Why does it only work with certain facilitators? Indeed these are even present in the book itself, yet they seem to be ignored by the author/narrator by the end.

The initial part of the book I thought was pretty good, comparable to Miracle Creek. The mystery of the father's disappearance and the finding of different hints was intriguing. But this all fell apart by the end and turned into some kind of advertisement for these unsupported “communication” methods. The ending was very unsatisfying as a result.

See this article for more info on this:
https://www.asha.org/slp/asha-warns-against-rapid-prompting-method-or-spelling-to-communicate/