Review: Narrators, characters with autism add something extra
April 11th, 2010As people with autism spectrum disorders take a more prominent place in society, Los Angeles Times reviewer Sonja Bolle finds a crop of books for kids and young adults that explore their world. These books can help, she says, by perhaps giving us all a better sense of the variety of human experience.
Among her selections:
- Al Capone Does My Shirts and Al Capone Shines My Shoes, by Gennifer Choldenko
- Mockingbird, by Kathryn Erskine
- Anything But Typical, by Nora Raleigh Baskin
- The London Eye Mystery, by Siobhan Dowd
- Marcelo in the Real World, by Francisco X. Stork
An excerpt:
All these novels are worth reading just because they have fascinating characters. Readers might like to enter their minds at least in fiction, and who knows? Perhaps they’d be inspired to take a new look at some of their classmates.

