Beautifully Different

When Emily Urquhart’s firstborn dazzles the maternity ward with blindingly white hair, the child’s beauty triggers emotional, medical and family history consequences that Urquhart, with her unique credentials as folklorist and journalist, absorbs into the narrative DNA of Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family and the Mystery of Our Hidden Genes. Step by step she records her mystification and education as she and her husband discover what it means to have a child whose skin pigmentation and eyesight will be a challenge to live with from hour to hour for the child’s entire life—and, of course, for theirs. Urquhart begins with her daughter Sadie’s diagnosis of albinism, then ventures with the family across North America, then with her husband to Africa, tracking both encouraging and harrowing stories of this almost mythological ocular and pigmentation disorder, even as she journeys in time back through generations of the Urquhart family. What makes the pilgrimage...