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.
This book was awarded the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, but as well intentioned as it might have been, it was clearly written by someone with almost no understanding of what Aspies are really like—it was written by and for a neurotypical audience.
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.