Happy Endings and Overcoming Autism
Autistic people learn, change, and cope like anyone else. However, when a character is autistic, many authors appear to see only one route for character growth: effectively making the character less autistic.
Autistic people learn, change, and cope like anyone else. However, when a character is autistic, many authors appear to see only one route for character growth: effectively making the character less autistic.
The “autism voice”—characterized by narrative devices and a detached character voice—tends to portray autistic characters as unworldly, hyper-rational blank slates defined purely by a series of unusual behaviors.
Here is a key insight to creating realistic autistic characters: We do not do the visibly autistic things we do because of “autism,” full stop. Like non-autistic people, we are responding to our experiences of the world. Those experiences simply differ from those of non-autistic people.
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.
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.
A brief list of recommendations our contributors put together.