Kim Reads Books About Things

Opting not to rate this since it's just a preview.

As a person with an atypical (others' words, not mine) case of Asperger Syndrome, I have a hard time with books with autistic protagonists. (I love Mockingbird, Marcelo in the Real World, and Anything But Typical, and hate the others I've read.) Books where characters have autistic family members are no problem for me, though, as they generally get it right, and Ann M. Martin wrote A Corner of the Universe, a book about a girl with an autistic uncle, which was great. So I went into this preview kind of torn in expectations, and got something pretty much exactly what I thought I would. In a good way.

On one hand, this book's writing is unmistakably odd. At first it felt cloying and forced, like she wrote Rose to be the autistic everykid in that awful Curious Incident way. On the other, it didn't take long for Rose's way of telling her story to charm me. I've known other aspie kids who talk like this, and while it's not my favorite style of writing, and it's overused in this kind of story, it worked here. That urge to yell "STOP TALKING ABOUT HOMOPHONES" was most likely intended, and fails to make Rose an annoying character. She's not as utterly real to me as Caitlin from Mockingbird, but she's close.

The way the dad was felt painfully real to me. This is astoundingly rare in books like these, and I'm grateful.

The book doesn't come out for a couple more months, but I'm looking forward to seeing how things turn out.