![](https://disabilityinkidlit.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/curiousincident-300x158.jpg)
Review: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
This book portrays its autistic protagonist in ways that will give readers negative, incorrect, and in some cases abusive ideas about autistic people.
This book portrays its autistic protagonist in ways that will give readers negative, incorrect, and in some cases abusive ideas about autistic people.
While we’re never told exactly what Marcelo’s impairment is, and it’s implied that no one can quite figure it out, it shares many features that will be familiar to those of us on the autism spectrum.
While Rory’s portrayal isn’t flawless, it’s well researched, and a significant step in the right direction of treating autistic characters as regular teenagers and integral parts of the cast.
Jacobus nailed the struggle with addiction, she nailed physical limitations, she nailed alcoholic and disability-related depression, she nailed the chaos of the active alcoholic, and she nailed the hopelessness and despair that can come from all of it.
Despite their proclamations to the contrary—“don’t tell me you’re one of those people who becomes their disease”—the characters are shown to have nothing in their lives that isn’t about their cancer.
You Look Different in Real Life is a contemporary YA novel in which the broken friendship between the protagonist and her autistic best friend plays a central role–a thoughtfully handled plot thread that we were eager to talk to author Jennifer Castle about.
We recap the highlights of our #diklSFF Twitter chat, including a link to the full Storify.
Many characters who may be mentally ill reject treatment out of hand, considering therapy a waste of time and suspecting medication will turn them into a zombie. Why are these narratives so popular? What are the alternatives?
After second grade, I stopped reading most books unless they were assigned for class. Even then, I often didn’t read them. The reason being, when I read a sentence, I often didn’t understand it. Somewhere between my eyes seeing the words and my brain, the phrase disappeared into the ether.
The two or three months I managed to get by on the reduced dose were enough to convince me: My psychiatrist is lying. I don’t need medication. I’m fine. I can beat this. Until, of course, I couldn’t.