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Title: Marcelo in the Real World
Author: Francisco X. Stork
Number of Pages: 307
Genre: Young Adult
Book Number/ Goal: 2/40
My Rating: 4.5/5
Though Marcelo is smart and high-functioning, he is somewhere on the Autistic spectrum. He has spent his school years at Paterson, a private school for students with physical and mental disabilities, and he's looking forward to his senior year, when he will start training a pony at Paterson for hippotherapy. Then, at the beginning of summer, Marcelo's lawyer father hits him with a challenge: he wants Marcelo to be able to function in the "real world." He wants him to leave Paterson and go to public school next year. But Marcelo has one other chance to prove himself: if he can spend the summer working in his father's law office, and demonstrate his ability to function in the real world that way, he can go to Paterson next year.
Marcelo struggles to get along with Jasmine, the mail room clerk, and Wendell, his father's law partner's son. He struggles with human interactions, hidden motives, the anger and pressures of a law office. Then he finds a picture -- a picture of a girl disfigured by a windshield made by the company his father is defending. The scope of the book suddenly explodes; what starts as a portrait of Marcelo's struggles to live in the real world, given his cognitive differences, turns into a heartbreaking questioning of how any of us can live in the real world, given its suffering, its dilemmas, its questions that have no answers.
It can be hard to resist turning non-neurotypical characters into ethereal saints, and Stork treads a fine line; Marcelo is deeply interested in religion. In fact, this is one of those Young Adult novels that walks boldly right into didactic territory, spending more time on philosophical questions than on what plot there is. And yet Stork makes it work. Marcelo is a believable, sympathetic, and rarely too-good-to-be-true character, and his quest to do the right thing is compelling.
Author: Francisco X. Stork
Number of Pages: 307
Genre: Young Adult
Book Number/ Goal: 2/40
My Rating: 4.5/5
Though Marcelo is smart and high-functioning, he is somewhere on the Autistic spectrum. He has spent his school years at Paterson, a private school for students with physical and mental disabilities, and he's looking forward to his senior year, when he will start training a pony at Paterson for hippotherapy. Then, at the beginning of summer, Marcelo's lawyer father hits him with a challenge: he wants Marcelo to be able to function in the "real world." He wants him to leave Paterson and go to public school next year. But Marcelo has one other chance to prove himself: if he can spend the summer working in his father's law office, and demonstrate his ability to function in the real world that way, he can go to Paterson next year.
Marcelo struggles to get along with Jasmine, the mail room clerk, and Wendell, his father's law partner's son. He struggles with human interactions, hidden motives, the anger and pressures of a law office. Then he finds a picture -- a picture of a girl disfigured by a windshield made by the company his father is defending. The scope of the book suddenly explodes; what starts as a portrait of Marcelo's struggles to live in the real world, given his cognitive differences, turns into a heartbreaking questioning of how any of us can live in the real world, given its suffering, its dilemmas, its questions that have no answers.
It can be hard to resist turning non-neurotypical characters into ethereal saints, and Stork treads a fine line; Marcelo is deeply interested in religion. In fact, this is one of those Young Adult novels that walks boldly right into didactic territory, spending more time on philosophical questions than on what plot there is. And yet Stork makes it work. Marcelo is a believable, sympathetic, and rarely too-good-to-be-true character, and his quest to do the right thing is compelling.
