HIV Positive

Wolf's (Homeless) latest photo-essay introduces a 29-year-old New York City woman who, infected more than six years earlier with the HIV virus, has developed AIDS. While his text provides some facts about how the disease is transmitted and treated, Wolf focuses primarily on how AIDS has transformed the daily lives of Sara and her two young children. Despite its somber cover photograph, which shows the children giving their bedridden mother her medication, the tenor of the book is relatively hopeful. At the time Wolf photographed the family, an energetic-seeming Sara had rebounded from a grave bout with pneumocystic pneumonia and was able to do household chores, attend her daughter's First Communion and participate in an AIDS march. Yet Sara's anxiety about her future health and her constantly bickering children, who are afraid to tell their classmates about their mother's illness, casts a realistic, poignant shadow. Occasionally, the narrative rambles (applying for group therapy for Sara's kids fills five pages) and is marred by clicheed language (on one page, ""the virus has a cunning intelligence"" and ""Sara feels as if she is living on borrowed time""). Others will object to his editorializing (""The U.S. government has remained oddly uninterested in protecting its citizens against this threat to their lives""). But Wolf's candid photographs contain nothing extraneous: the cumulative effect of the ordinary scenes is potent and bittersweet. Ages 8-12. (May)