I truly wanted to love this book—especially as it features one of the very few textually autistic characters written by an autistic author. In the end, though, I was left with mixed-to-negative feelings and a lot of disappointment.
A good ending doesn’t erase the time I spent feeling isolated, excluded, and hurt because of the way Rose is treated.
The pain of being the butt of someone else’s joke comes back to me whenever I read fiction that depicts characters on the autism spectrum who repeatedly take idioms and other expressions literally, or fail to understand the double meaning of words in embarrassing ways.
The world does its best to remove our autism from the mainstream narrative of life, hiding either it or us whenever possible. In the world of fiction, we often see these same attempts.
This book portrays its autistic protagonist in ways that will give readers negative, incorrect, and in some cases abusive ideas about autistic people.
Overall, I was very pleased with Al Capone Does My Shirts and how it depicts autism. Moose and Natalie are complex and endearing characters who remain with you long after the book is closed.
Marketing departments choose to focus a book in a certain way when they write these summaries, and summaries for kidlit featuring autism often seem to focus on the same things.
What’s missing here is not any aspect of how the autistic character is depicted, per se—what’s missing is something subtler in the narrator’s depiction, and in her point of view.
During April 2015, we’re holding an event dubbed Autism on the Page. Why is this event important? And what can you expect from us?
While Call’s disability informs his character, it’s hardly the focus of the story, and I appreciated that. What I liked even more was the way Black and Clare treated Call’s disability when they did mention it.