geekyYesterday, I read Silence, by Michelle Sagara. She's a fellow DAW author, a sweet, smart lady, and an all-around neat person whom I adore both personally and professionally. But before yesterday, I have never wanted to hug her for an hour and thank her forever.
Silence is a solid, interestingly-told YA novel that seems, superficially, to be just another wave in the current flood of YA supernatural. Being a wave isn't bad; I write urban fantasy, I am basically sponsoring a surfing competition. But there's something wonderful about diving into a wave and discovering infinitely more.
Emma, our protagonist, talks to dead people. She has several close female friends, including Allison, who would be a stereotypical geek in some stories, and Amy, who would be just as stereotypically a mean girl. Yet they work, and they make sense, because they are genuinely written as people. It's not presented as criminal to be smart, or to be pretty: it's just who you are. Emma's greatest asset is her niceness, a genuine generosity of spirit that is so very rare in heroines today. She reminded me of Vixy, and that's about the highest praise I have.
But really, where this book won me, and why I recommend it so readily, was when we met Michael. Michael, who is a high-functioning autistic who has been going to school with Emma and the others since kindergarten. Michael, who is in advanced math and science classes and doing just fine, thank you. Michael, whose friends care about him and look out for him, and who value his friendship and his place in their lives. He is presented with limitations, but so is every other character in the book. He's presented as a person, and for that alone, I will love Michelle forever.
Read Silence. Read it because it's awesome, and read it because any author who includes a complex, well-written, believable, believably autistic central character deserves our applause, and book sales are the best form of clapped hands, for an author.
My hat is off to her.
May 10 2012, 00:50:39 UTC 5 years ago
So there may be an added element of 'real' and that would be why. She is on LJ
http://msagara.livejournal.com/
May 10 2012, 01:47:33 UTC 5 years ago
I haven't read Silence yet (no disposable income, and no disposable time with moving and disability applications), but none of her books (Sun Sword, Elantra, or Sundered) have ever disappointed me.
May 14 2012, 04:29:58 UTC 5 years ago
Actually, you may not know that you have experience with anyone on the spectrum. There is a wide swath of the autism spectrum that can present as neurotypical—you wouldn't know it unless they told you. It's a sensory processing issue and can manifest itself in odd ways.
And I say this because after we got a diagnosis of our son as mildly autistic (as in, stick him in a special ed preschool so he learns coping techniques rather than having to develop them himself and he'll probably be mainstreamed by the time he hits third grade), my husband started noticing interesting developmental parallels with his childhood.
We're considering getting a diagnosis just to clear things up, but we're pretty sure based on the evidence that he was exactly the same autism profile as our son, and nobody noticed because he just seemed to be a bright, somewhat geeky kid*.
*His mother insists that no, he couldn't possibly be on the spectrum. Which is amusing, since she's the one who pushed us to get our kid tested & into therapy. She was a special ed teacher and may have instinctively compensated.
May 14 2012, 05:02:59 UTC 5 years ago
And as I thought about it, I do know someone, although not well - a coworker's son is somewhere on the spectrum, although I don't know where. I remember she had a hard time one day when the schools had a snow day, but we didn't, and he couldn't understand why there wasn't school and it wasn't a holiday.
May 10 2012, 17:53:24 UTC 5 years ago
May 14 2012, 04:47:23 UTC 5 years ago
Her posts are fascinating, though. I love the way they let their son have some control, so he could let go of some of the schedule rigidity. It's really just an extension of any parent-child relationship, just more obvious - with a helicopter parent, you get a young adult in college who doesn't know how to deal well with new situations. If the parents start letting their offspring have more and more control of their lives as they get older, they're more comfortable with themselves and changes in their environment.