Try free for 30 days

A 30-day trial plus your first audiobook free.
1 credit/month after trial—to buy any title you like, yours to keep.
Listen all you want to a selection of thousands of Audible Originals, audiobooks and podcasts.
$16.45 a month after 30 day trial. Cancel anytime.
Finding Lina cover art

Finding Lina

By: Helena Hjalmarsson
Narrated by: Jenna Berk
Free with 30-day trial

$16.45/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $26.99

Buy Now for $26.99

Pay using voucher balance (if applicable) then card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions Of Use and Privacy Notice and authorise Audible to charge your designated credit card or another available credit card on file.

Editorial reviews

After her second MMR vaccine, three-year-old Lina lost her ability to play, use language, and control her impulses. Her mother Helena Hjalmarsson immediately embarked on a mission to find a diagnosis and treatment for her daughter, a quest that narrator Jenna Berk performs with empathy and authenticity. Berk movingly evokes Hjalmarsson's emotional highs and lows as she tries special schools, diets, therapy sessions, and more, all to find out what helps Lina and what doesn't. Berk's performance is especially radiant when her voice expresses the joy in Hjalmarsson's moments of connection with her daughter, and listeners will come away with an appreciation for Hjalmarsson's strength and courage.

Publisher's Summary

An honest and inspiring story of one mother’s quest to help her daughter with autism learn to engage with the world around her.

Lina was a precocious toddler - charming, chatty, joyful. At the age of three, in the aftermath of her second MMR vaccine, first came a seizure, and then, to her parents’ horror, the loss of Lina’s ability to play, use language, and control her impulses. Over the next few years they continued to lose Lina. She communicated her acute discomfort by biting, screaming, hitting, laughing maniacally, and throwing violent tantrums. As a single mother, with the help of her ex-husband, Helena Hjalmarsson tirelessly pursued every possible avenue to find a diagnosis, and more importantly a treatment, for her daughter, and the search continues to this day. Lina is nine.

Special schools, restrictive diets, sensory stimulation, relationship-based therapy, gastrointestinal links, homeopathy, and allergy treatment are all explored in detail. Hjalmarsson finds out what helps Lina and what doesn’t. She introduces sign language to Lina. She engages in lengthy daily intensive one-on-one sessions. With the help of her ex, angelic babysitters, Lina’s exceptionally empathetic younger sister, and supportive friends, Hjalmarsson manages to create a meaningful life for Lina, and for herself - a life of love and transcendence.

Lina, for all her challenges, has much to teach, and Hjalmarsson is a receptive student: finding joy in moments of connection, learning to live in the present, taking nothing for granted, accepting what others find unbearable, and finding a strength and spiritual base for inspiration and healing.

Unflinchingly honest and courageous, Finding Lina will open the eyes and hearts and minds of all parents, whether they have a child with autism or not.

©2013 Helena Hjalmarsson (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

What listeners say about Finding Lina

Average Customer Ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.