12/22/2025
Rita Angelini
**Genre:** Non-Fiction: Parenting, Disability
Bio
Rita has spent years navigating the world of special education, therapies, and advocacy. Rita is a retired Certified Public Accountant who now pursues her passion for writing full-time. An Unexpected Normal won Silver for “Unpublished Memoir” in the 2022 Royal Palm Literary Competition, and Rita has published four short essays in four anthologies. Rita enjoys volunteering with the disabled, boating on the Gulf, and traveling the country with her husband in their RV.
Book Description
Faced with the possibility of losing their three-day-old second child when she contracts meningitis,
Normann and Rita Angelini experience all five stages of grief. Terrified for their daughter, they bargain, plead, and beg for a miracle—and they get one, but it isn’t what they expected: though KiKi survives, her illness results in severe brain damage, and she is ultimately diagnosed with cerebral palsy.
After this diagnosis, denial and anger take over. Rita fights to keep her vision of who she thinks KiKi could be, and she channels her energy into searching for a procedure—some therapy—that would change KiKi’s outcome. In pursuit of a cure, the Angelini family treks across the United States and abroad—but somewhere along the way, acceptance of and joy in who KiKi is prevail over the idea of “fixing” her.
A memoir of unending hope, faith lost and rediscovered, and unconditional love, it offers other parents of children born with a disability hope that joy is within reach.
