{"id":1107,"date":"2015-04-01T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-04-01T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.wordpress.com\/?p=1107"},"modified":"2021-08-22T14:39:25","modified_gmt":"2021-08-22T14:39:25","slug":"review-silence-by-michelle-sagara","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/2015\/04\/01\/review-silence-by-michelle-sagara\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Silence<\/i> by Michelle Sagara"},"content":{"rendered":"

I like to write about books with autistic characters in them. Silence<\/a><\/em> by Michelle Sagara isn\u2019t a book with an autistic protagonist; it is a book about Emma, a neurotypical teenager dealing with grief and loss, who develops an ability to see and interact with the dead. The autistic character, a boy Emma\u2019s age named Michael, is secondary. Yet Michael is also central to what Silence<\/em> was intended to be about. Sagara, who is the parent of an autistic boy herself, explains in an interview with John Scalzi<\/a>:<\/p>\n

She was part of a group of friends, and they kept an eye out for my son… Why not these girls? Girls who were best friends and who supported each other (often by phone even in the early years) and who, while having lives entirely of their own also<\/em> had the compassion to keep an eye on an awkward ASD child? It\u2019s a paranormal, it\u2019s contemporary, but why can\u2019t the story be about girls like these?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Cover<\/a>\t\n\t
\n\t\t\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\tBUY ON BOOKSHOP<\/span>\n\t\t\t\tBOOKSHOP<\/span>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t& support independent bookstores\n\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t<\/article> \n\n\t<\/center><\/div>In other words, Michael is central to the book, not because of himself, but because Emma and her friends help take care of him and that makes them good people. In fact, Emma\u2019s goodness and compassion are central parts of the book\u2019s plot. Most people who develop powers like Emma\u2019s become evil necromancers who exploit the dead, but Emma only wants to help them \u2014 a fact which conveniently convinces a local group of necromancer hunters not to kill her.<\/p>\n

This is where a lot of my misgivings about the book come from, and is complicated to talk about. I don\u2019t want to suggest that it is somehow bad or undesirable to provide clueful help to a disabled person. Yet I think a lot of us with disabilities will feel a familiar wince at the idea of being a charity case \u2014 of being valuable, not for ourselves, but so that someone else can earn goodness points by helping us.<\/p>\n

By and large, Emma does do things for Michael \u2014 walking him to school, explaining things to him, helping him prepare for unexpected changes of routine \u2014 that seem reasonable and genuinely helpful. And Michael\u2019s impairments and needs are described without exaggeration or demonization. Moreover, Michael does have other demonstrated character traits in the book besides impairments. It takes a few chapters before these traits begin to visibly emerge, but they do. He\u2019s good with children, and this proves useful as the ghosts of children begin to appear. He\u2019s one of the first to matter-of-factly accept the news of Emma\u2019s experiences, without any complaints about her being or sounding “crazy.” And since his brain works differently, he\u2019s also less affected by certain necromancer spells than other characters \u2014 which allows him, in a crowning moment, to save Emma by hitting a necromancer with one of his D&D books.<\/p>\n

(Though after that, the idiosyncratic reaction to magic isn\u2019t mentioned very much and doesn\u2019t become a very big part of the plot, which arguably stops it from veering into Magical Disabled Person territory. I personally think that, since autistic people\u2019s brain wiring is known to be different, and we frequently have idiosyncratic reactions to medicine and other things, an idiosyncratic reaction to magic is a perfectly logical thing for some of us to have!)<\/p>\n

What\u2019s missing here is not any aspect of how Michael is depicted, per se \u2014 what\u2019s missing is something subtler in Emma\u2019s <\/em>depiction, and in Emma\u2019s point of view.<\/p>\n

Emma is devoted to helping Michael, and as a result, she focuses on the problems he has and the things he needs help with. She occasionally also acknowledges what he\u2019s good at, but these moments go by very quickly. What\u2019s missing, even at these positive moments, is any sense that Emma likes<\/em> Michael \u2014 that, in addition to wanting to help him, she might consider him as any sort of friend.<\/p>\n

(Michael does have actual friends, by the way, in the form of two boys who talk to him about Dungeons and Dragons at lunchtime. They get very little screen time.)<\/p>\n

Sagara is clearly trying to pull this part off, with occasional lines like this one:<\/p>\n

“Emma has always gotten along with Michael because Emma sees<\/em> Michael. She doesn’t see what she wants him to be, she doesn’t see what he lacks. She just sees what he is, and she understands it.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But that insistence on \u201cseeing\u201d, and on how wonderful Emma is with him, falls a little bit flat when her normal internal response is more like this:<\/p>\n

[Eric] listened to Michael without eye rolling, which was pretty much the only requirement in a lunch companion at this table.<\/p>\n

Not, Emma thought, if she was being fair, that she didn’t sometimes engage in eye rolling, but she felt she’d earned that, and Michael understood what it meant when she did it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s not that Emma ever seems to dislike Michael, or to be bigoted against him in any really obvious way. It\u2019s that, aside from wanting to help him, her emotions towards him always seem to be some strange mix of tolerance, pity, amusement and mild annoyance.<\/p>\n

These would be realistic emotions if Emma were, say, Michael\u2019s older sister. But in a classmate who associates with him of her own free will, they strike me as strange. As an autistic reader, particularly in the first half of the book, watching Michael through Emma\u2019s eyes mostly just makes me kind of sad. Like a constant reminder that, yes, this is really how we come across to other people, even the ones who are mostly very helpful and get praise for how good they are with us.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a subtle problem, and compared to the problems in many other books about the caretakers of autistic people, it\u2019s a minor one. Michael at least gets basic respect and a social group, accuracy in how his autism is portrayed, and a few things to do in the plot. For a neurotypical reader interested in books with autistic secondary characters, this might not be a bad book at all. But for autistic readers looking for a character they can identify with, I don\u2019t think I can recommend it very much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What\u2019s missing here is not any aspect of how the autistic character is depicted, per se\u2014what\u2019s missing is something subtler in the narrator’s<\/em> depiction, and in her point of view.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":1108,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_generate-full-width-content":"","kt_blocks_editor_width":""},"categories":[62,522],"tags":[140,145],"genre":[9],"age_category":[8],"disability":[7],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1107"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7335,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107\/revisions\/7335"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1107"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=1107"},{"taxonomy":"age_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/age_category?post=1107"},{"taxonomy":"disability","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/disabilityinkidlit.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disability?post=1107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}