His Hands Were Quiet: A Review

[image: Brown book cover. Small yellow text at
the top reads, "Zachary Goldman Mysteries 2"
Next, the title in white all caps text reads,
"His Hands Were Quiet." Next is an image of a
yellow triangle with a silhouette of a person bending
backwards and being struck in the chest with a
bolt of electricity. Large yellow text at the 
bottom reads, "PD Workman".]

Maxfield Sparrow
His Hands Were Quiet
By P.D. Workman

Content notes: suicide, abuse, murder, house fires, burn injuries, PTSD, Judge Rotenberg Center, ABA

This book review gets all the Autistic trigger warnings. It is a gripping thriller/suspense novel that could help people understand autism and Autistic people better, and it is raw and honest about what some of the most vulnerable Autistic people endure. It will be a tense read for everyone and could be especially triggering for many Autistic people, so proceed carefully with this review and remember that your self care is more important than anything.

Zachary Goldman is a private investigator with his own past history of trauma. He grew up in the foster care system and had a long and painful recovery from being badly burned in a house fire. He’s not in the greatest life situation when the novel opens—he’s sleeping on someone’s couch and not even doing that very well. Zachary suffers nightmares and insomnia from the stress of his current situation and the long-term effects of trauma.

When the mother of an Autistic boy living in a residential facility contacts him to investigate her son’s death—the institution and the coroner have decided that her son’s death was a suicide but she doesn’t feel that’s the truth—Zachary falls down a rabbit hole of autism therapies, electric shock, and adult Autistic protestors. Will Zachary uncover the truth about the boy’s death? Was it suicide? Murder? And why do the therapies used in the school make Zachary feel so uncomfortable? It looks to him like torture, but surely professionals know what’s right?

I have been a fan of P.D. Workman’s writing for years. She mainly writes YA and adult genre fiction and develops relatable underdog characters who move the story forward with their drive to understand and be understood. Workman’s characters seek and speak truth while others doubt their information and often their basic life competence.

Zachary Goldman is no exception to the theme. In fairness, his life is in shambles when the story opens, but people hover, untrusting. Both his ex and his friend who owns the couch Zachary is crashing on suspect he’s going off the deep end when he becomes obsessed with the school, the therapies, and the autistic children as he watches more and more troubling “therapeutic” situations—including a malfunction of a skin shock device, resulting in an electrical burn on an autistic girl’s skin.

As you may have already guessed by now, the school in the novel is modeled after the infamous Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC). When Zachary begins his investigation, he’s shown reward areas with cartoon characters, bright colors, a ball pit. He’s given the “glossy brochure” tour and might have walked away satisfied if it weren’t for all the protestors outside. The school’s director has Zachary enter and leave through a back door, hoping he would ignore the protestors, but Zachary ends up talking to a woman, an Autistic adult, who is with the protestors.

There are many moments in the novel that shine as not just scenes in a well-crafted story, but sensitive and insightful teaching moments. Zachary’s conversation with the protestor is one of those moments. As a longtime fan of Workman’s writing, I knew she was working on this novel and, along with many other Autistic activists and advocates, helped her connect with as much #ActuallyAutistic #OwnVoices as we could. Her research was tremendous and I felt a depth of understanding of Autistic issues throughout the novel. Some characters are ableist, some are grappling with entrenched ableism, but the bedrock of the novel is clearly respectful and Autistic-allied.

“Even without aversives, therapy can still cause PTSD or other anxiety or emotional problems.” 

Zachary scratched the back of his neck. “Do you have proof of that?” 

“I am proof of that.” 

He looked at her, studying her face and her body language. “You did ABA?” 

“Yes. I did.” 

“What for? You aren’t autistic, are you?” 

“Yes, I am.” 

 “You… must be very high-functioning. I wouldn’t have guessed it…” 

 “Do you think that’s a compliment?” she snapped. 

Zachary fumbled for an answer. He had clearly said the wrong thing. He’d somehow insulted her. And he didn’t know what he’d done or how to undo it. 

“You think I want to be like you?” Margaret persisted, her eyes flaming. 

 “Like me?” Zachary let out one bitter bark of laughter before he caught himself. “No, I don’t think you would want to be like me.”

(From His Hands Were Quiet, location 1088, Kindle version)

Researching for the case, Zachary reads the ABA classic text, The Me Book by O. Ivar Lovaas. At points throughout the story, Zachary reflects on what he had read in The Me Book and how it relates to the aversive therapies he witnesses in the school.

And Lovaas… what had Lovaas said? He had said something along the lines of some children being rewarded by negativity and punishment, so that the parent or therapist had to be very angry and hard on them to get the proper results, and that weeks or months of such intense therapy could be taxing on the parent. Poor parents, having to be so hard on their kids. Zachary shook his head, thinking about the arrogance of such a statement.

(Location 1995)

His Hands Were Quiet serves as an engaging fictionalized introduction to many crucial issues in the Autistics Rights movement. Many people who would be disinterested in reading non-fiction political writing will find themselves drawn into and caring about the human rights issues of the JRC, ABA therapies, the presumption of Autistic competence, and related issues through reading Workman’s mystery/suspense novel. His Hands Were Quiet is part of a series of novels about Zachary Goldman’s cases, but reads well as a stand-alone novel.

If there are people in your life who enjoy detective novels and would want to (or NEED to!) learn more about autism, here’s your Christmas present for them. Workman’s eye-opening story will lead to many fruitful discussions and much increased empathy for the struggles and needs of Autistic people.

Once more, I warn about the general content of the book, which can be intense at times, both in the ways that most mystery/suspense novels are but also for any Autistic who has experienced stressful therapies. With that caveat in mind, I loved this novel and recommend it to anyone who enjoys the genre.

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Hoshi and the Red City Circuit: An Excellent Debut by a Neurodivergent Author About Neurodivergent Protagonists

[image: Illustrated cover of the book Hoshi and the
Red City Circuit, by Dora M Raymaker,
featuring a person in silhouette sitting
on the ground fending off rays of power from
a pitchfork-wielding person silhouetted in red.]

Kelly Israel

Introduction

Hoshi and the Red City Circuit, the debut work by Dora Raymaker, is first and foremost an excellent page-turning detective story about private investigator Hoshi Archer’s race to discover who murdered three Operators. Operators are a caste of people with disabilities. They are also the only people who have the ability to run the multi-layered, complex technology of the future. It is next a story about Hoshi herself and the many friends, allies, acquaintances, enemies, and lovers she has known and cared for on her way to becoming the person that she is.

Hoshi is also a story that grapples with the intellectual and developmental disability (I/DD) community’s ghosts and collective past. It attempts through showing—rather than telling—to explain how it is that an individual person with I/DD can live in a world that alternatively hates and pities them, loves and loathes them, supports and exploits them.

This is important because we are a community with a painful history. Many autistic people and others with I/DD have experienced terrible ableism as well as both emotional and physical abuse, often at the hands of the very people who were supposed to help us. Hoshi echoes this sordid history in many of its plot threads, and thereby explains it via fiction to those who do not have it burned into their flesh and bone. Above all else, it is a complex and interesting read.

The Positives

One of the primary characters of the book besides Hoshi (both literally and metaphorically!) is the place where Hoshi lives—The Red City. (I won’t spoil for you how the Red City becomes a literal main character.) The Red City exists in a human civilization of the extremely distant future, on a non-Earth planet with its own intricate politics, social constructs, crime syndicates, and religions.

Dora Raymaker made me love the Red City. It is to the author's credit that The Red City has a clear and unrelenting sense of place. I never once was given the impression that it was an artificial or simplified construct. The history of Red City began long before the reader got there, and it will continue long after the reader has left. It has its own slang, look, and feel to its culture. The people of the Red City are take-no-shit-from-anyone hardworking police officers, exhausted dock workers trying to make a living, arrogant no-nothing jerks, criminals and crime lords, and esoteric mystics who commune with very real aliens that live on a different plane of existence from us. Hoshi Archer’s own description of how Red City looks from her window describes it best:

"Outside my cathedral window, the jagged skyline of Red City reached for crimson clouds. I traced the graceful spiral of the Arts and Culture Building, the triple towers of the 100 Worlds Trade Union joined by their series of sky-bridges, the prickly quills of the Red City Reporter, the dip of Lan Qui Park all the way down to Landing and Marcie Bay. I loved Red City. Loved every street corner and sky-lift, every tree in every park, every rumbling tube beneath her crust." -Hoshi and the Red City Circuit, Ch. 1

It’s worth pointing out that Hoshi repeats something similar to this description many times. She, at any and all opportunities, describes her read on the history of each quarter of the city that her investigation takes her to. Beholding her favorite buildings in the city is both satisfying, and likely a form of stimming. It’s fun and exciting to listen to her and find out what she knows. Raymaker could not have picked a better special interest for their protagonist.

Dr. Raymaker makes no attempt to hide that, although the Operators have a fictional developmental disability known as K-Syndrome, they are very much intended to be similar to autistic people and others with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Only a few years ago, all Operators were slaves forced to do nothing but program and operate the future-tech machines and linked Internet-like space called the Mem that keeps Red City running. They were feared for their fine-tuned control of this space, and yet were absolutely necessary for its functioning. Their connection to it was deliberately limited by oppressive rules and regulations that bear a probably intentional similarity to those that govern institutions in the United States. In the present, due to a law known as Integration Law, Operators like Hoshi can work non-Operator jobs. It is an uneasy compromise, with both Operators and non-Operators alike having a variety of different opinions on the rightness of the law and whether it achieves its goals.

Hoshi Archer is an attractive, interesting, lovable neurodivergent protagonist. She is a brilliant detective, able to piece together disparate pieces of information nearly faster than the reader can. She has a powerful coffee addiction that reminds me more than a little of myself. She is incredibly brave yet deeply afraid of becoming a slave again, to the point where her fear can cloud her understanding of who is her friend and who is her enemy. She can be rigid and obsessive in her pursuit of justice, and has difficulty comprehending the more obtuse social and metaphorical aspects of life and society, such as religion.

One of my favorite passages occurs just after the Red City police officer Hoshi works closely with, Sorreno, forces Hoshi to take a weapon even though Hoshi despises being armed. The passage conveys in a way that I cannot what it is like to be a person with I/DD traumatized by a past in which people have forced specific choices upon you:

"I sulked in front of my window, watching the tiny people on the streets twelve stories down, weaving through their hours. If I squinted, the colors of their clothing melted them into long rivers of pattern. 

"None of them were forced to carry a shocker. Or to report in to the IO. Or to be under constant threat of being displaced from everything they loved and thrown into a supervised livestock pen in a job they hate but will be imprisoned or even killed for not doing with no hope of anything better if—forbid!—they end up accidentally missing a meal two weeks in a row. 

"I hit my fist hard against the hard glass. 

"The pain giving me something namable, tangible, blamable to justify my anger. 

"The bitterness of my life up until two years ago broke over the surface of my consciousness and I scratched at the synthskin covering the unhealed scars." -Hoshi and the Red City Circuit, Ch. 12

That Operators themselves do not uniformly agree on Integration Law one way or the other is a testament to the sheer variety of neurodivergent people Raymaker describes. The hero, the hero’s extremely slimy sometimes-ally, sometimes-enemy drug lord acquaintance Luzzie Vai (who happens to be one of my favorite characters in the book), the hero’s anti-Integration yet emotionally beautiful murdered lover, the nearly incomprehensible and mysterious priest Gno, and the cowardly and irritating Martin Ho are all neurodivergent. Each of these characters is given three-dimensional characterization. The book’s characterization is one of the strongest elements of its writing. I wanted to spend as much time as possible with almost everyone in it.

Equal to the book’s characters is the book’s central unsolved murder. I won’t spoil a single thing about it, and that’s because it’s something the reader should enjoy for themselves! Hoshi must race against time to determine who killed the three Operators, how, and why before the serial killer claims their next victim. I found myself obsessively devouring chapters to try and follow Hoshi to the next clue, eager to learn more about how the book’s impossible crime was committed. Hoshi must travel all throughout Red City to solve the murder, from the centrally located Cleopatra Square to the Integration Office to the grim, vaguely brutalist Operator housing where her lover Claudia once lived. The mystery has the heft and complications of the best detective novels, and ultimately places the protagonist’s inner conflict at its center, as its beating heart.

The Negatives

While I did love the book, I do have a few sustained criticisms. The first is that the book is slow to explain itself. While a reader of fantasy or science fiction would be quite used to the full-immersion manner in which Raymaker introduces us to the slang and terminology of their world, a reader of detective novels may be quite confused for the first thirty or forty pages. The book can take longer than it should to make the meanings of these words clear to an uninitiated reader.

Additionally, the book can be a bit clumsy in its treatment of some issues. For instance, a real-world religion (or an interpretation of the form that religion would take in the future) plays a prominent role in the book. While I do not know enough myself to say whether Raymaker consulted spiritual leaders or adherents for the purposes of writing Hoshi (they do mention specific real world gods by name and the god’s known sphere), I feel the book could do more to make the depiction of the religion less vague and superficial.

Finally, I feel that the true main villain of the book, and the villain’s motivations, are too simple in comparison to the detailed and clear personalities of the other characters. Without giving too much away, real people similar to the villain are themselves extraordinarily complex in their desires and reasons for doing what they do. The oversimplification present in Hoshi’s depiction of one such person doesn’t quite serve the book’s story as well as it should. While there’s an argument to be made that dehumanizing the villain works well with the story’s themes, I feel that there is a difference between making someone irredeemable and making them two-dimensional. However, I recognize this is very much a your-mileage-may-vary issue.

Conclusion

Hoshi and the Red City Circuit is an excellent debut by a neurodivergent author about neurodivergent protagonists, set in an immediately engrossing future world. It has a lot to say about people, politics, and the complications of neurodiversity. It also acts as a great detective thriller that makes you want to keep reading. It has its problems and limitations, but the opinions of readers will vary. While the book very much has an autistic or I/DD audience in mind, I wholeheartedly recommend it to neurodivergent and neurotypical readers alike.

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Book Review: The State of Grace, by Rachael Lucas

Elizabeth Bartmess
elizabethbartmess.com

Book Cover via GoodReads.com
[image: Cover of the book The State of Grace:
A medium-green background covered with rows
of lighter green happy face emojis tilted sideways,
except one pink sad face emoji on the lower right.
Large white text in an all-caps informal font reads:
"The State of Grace"
Smaller text in white script reads, "Rachael Lucas"
Smaller white all-caps informal text in the upper right
reads, "Sometimes fitting in means standing out."]

The State of Grace is a young adult novel narrated by Grace, a fifteen-year-old high school student who deals with common teenage issues like dating, friendships, family conflict, and birthday parties, while also being autistic in a world not designed for autistic people.

Grace is a well-rounded and sympathetic character. She has various interests (horses, wildlife, Doctor Who, My Little Ponies), rides and cares for a horse, has friendships and complex relationships with her family members, and has a good—and sometimes entertainingly snarky—sense of humor. She's introspective and insightful about how being autistic affects her needs, such as extra recovery time after social interaction and the ability to leave stressful situations. She also has a good sense of how others' willingness (or refusal) to accommodate those needs affects her ability to deal with everyday life. She also has other issues common to autistic people, including sensory overwhelm, sleep schedule dysregulation, difficulty interpreting others' imprecise or implicit communication, and difficulty providing other people with the responses and body language they expect.

The book shows clearly how even though Grace is often able to pass as neurotypical, it takes extensive effort:

"[m]y head is full of all the things I have to remember when I'm being a person every day: don't be rude, don't stare, don't look blankly into space when you're not thinking anything, shut down the noises of everything talking, concentrate, hold it together, don't have a meltdown…" (101-102)

Grace's descriptions are given in ways that autistic readers will connect with, and with enough detail (as far as I can tell) for neurotypical readers to understand what it can be like to be autistic while having to deal with the demands of ordinary life—a careful and impressive balance.

----

Throughout, the focus is kept on Grace's experience of the world, rather than others' experience of Grace—as it should be. This is particularly evident in her commentary on how other people treat her, which includes her frustration with not being consulted on important decisions, and not being believed or asked about her experiences:

"My parents seem to think life will be easier if my autism is on a need-to-know basis. I'm not sure it works, but nobody bothered to ask me." (32) 

"[T]he Quiet Room is a) next to the canteen so it smells of hot metal and thin, pointy headaches and b) is opposite the Gym Hall so the thud thud thud of basketballs makes me want to scream. But I suppose they tried. It's a shame they didn't actually consult anyone who'd want to use it, and that's why it ends up being a glorified store cupboard with a wall stacked with props from the end of-term performance and a stack of leftover copies of Of Mice and Men beside the ergonomic beanbag (hissing noise, weird smell) and a token lava lamp and some inspirational posters. And a dying plant." (5) 

"[People] tell me what they think I feel because they've read it in books, or they say incredible things like 'autistic people have no sense or humor or imagination or empathy' when I'm standing right there beside them (and one day I'm going to point out that that is more than a little bit rude, not to mention Not Even True) or they—even worse—talk to me like I'm about five, and can't understand." (134-135)

The focus on Grace’s experience also carries through in what’s made obvious to the reader and what isn’t. For example, there's something going on with the mother's new friend being a bad influence, and it wasn't clear what was going on until Grace learned more later. This is a refreshing change from portrayals where an autistic character's social difficulties are shown by their failing to understand something made so clear to the reader that the character seems to be ignoring obvious truths.

Instead, The State of Grace shows something more accurate: Grace has difficulty detecting and processing cues relevant to accurately understanding (some) social situations. Because the novel stays in her experience, the reader isn’t being provided with the neatly prepackaged information that a neurotypical person might perceive; they’re seeing the same genuinely ambiguous information that Grace is. That means Grace comes across as someone who’s doing her best despite not having all the information she needs, instead of being portrayed as having all the information she needs but inexplicably failing to draw the obvious conclusions. This will ring true for many autistic people, and give many non-autistic people an accurate window into a common (and frustrating) autistic experience.

This is a very effective window on a particular aspect of autistic experience.

Another realistic ongoing theme is Grace's difficulty negotiating for what she needs:

"I need to be quiet, somewhere, and just let myself settle, like a snow globe. But it's hard to make people understand that." (76) 

"Sometimes I end up staying places for hours longer than I want to because I don't know how to make my excuses and leave." (167)

Grace thinks of herself judgmentally sometimes, for example criticizing her tendency to monologue about special interests: "…even I can tell when I'm doing the fascinating facts by Grace thing sometimes" (116). She also references enacting neurotypical-defined rules as "being a person" (14) and says she "speak[s] human as a second language" (8). Although I would not want readers to walk away from the book equating being autistic with not being fully a person or human, this mirrors ways I've thought about my own experiences, and seeing it on the page made me feel connected with the character. (Other people's mileage may vary.)

----

In some areas the book edges into a "burden" trope, particularly with respect to Grace’s thirteen-year-old sister Leah. Both Grace's grandmother and Grace think her mother has overburdened Leah, because Leah is "sensible" (147); Grace's mother justifies this by saying Leah is "the capable one" (149) compared to Grace. Her mother has made Leah responsible for looking after Grace at times in the past. Grace's mother is also shown as having to choose between getting a job (which she wants to do) and staying at home to take care of children, although it's not clear that she actually needs to. It's also stated that "the voluntary stuff she does with the local autism support group takes over her entire life" (23).

These read to me as suboptimal parenting decisions by Grace’s mother, rather than something inherent to Grace being autistic, but someone who came to the book exposed to the stereotype of autistic people as burdens might interpret it as consistent with the stereotype. It helps that Grace's narrative make it clear that being autistic affects her far more than it affects others. This reflects autistic people’s real-life experiences: it is harder to be us than to be our family members.

There are also several incidents where Grace creates or contributes to situations where others are harmed, or narrowly escape harm. In one case, she shoves her sister into a wall after an unrelated argument with other people, because her sister’s "in the way and she's always so perfect and I hate myself" (97). In another, she makes an unwise decision while trying to impress a friend group, and isn't able to stop herself in midstream despite knowing it’s a bad idea (a type of executive-function failure that I can relate to). The third incident seemed like a bad decision that a non-autistic teenager could have easily made, and unrelated to her being autistic.

Her sister, mother, and friends readily forgive her, and no one talks with her about what she could do differently to prevent the same things from happening again. She feels terrible about each incident, but it felt like she was being let off unusually easily, or that they didn't think she’d be able to do better, and I wished they’d been portrayed as having more respect for her ability to change.

In real life, autistic people sometimes need more tolerance for mistakes because we have difficulty regulating our behavior in certain situations, or because we don’t always read situations well. And there are things it isn’t realistic to expect us to do—for example, we can’t stop a meltdown in midstream. It’s important to not try to make us change things about ourselves we can’t change, and it’s also important to recognize that we can (and should, and generally want to) figure out why we made avoidable mistakes, so we can avoid making them again.

----

Apart from the above issues, Grace's relationships with others were portrayed well. Her mother felt like a realistic mixed character, someone who messes up but also works to do better. She doesn't always understand Grace's perspective, but plays a supportive role; Grace says her mother "might make me want to scream sometimes, but she is good at recognizing when I've hit the wall and keeping me from losing it" (37).

Her relationship with her best friend also felt realistic. The friend, Anna, is described as the kind of person who is friends with everyone. She also helps Grace with some social stuff, e.g., interpreting ambiguous text messages. Although not universal, this is a common real-life friendship pattern I've seen described in non-fiction. Grace also mentions some reasons why Anna is friends with her: she makes Anna laugh and they have shared interests in fandom. This lets us see their friendship is not one-sided.

Grace connects with her love interest, Gabe, partly through shared fandom. Since shared interests are a common way for autistic people to develop meaningful relationships in real life, I appreciated it being portrayed here. Similarly, it’s common for us to become friends with other neurodivergent people, and Gabe has ADHD. There’s a charming scene where Gabe shares some of his ADHD-related experiences with Grace, and Grace tells him she’s autistic; he then asks her what it’s like, and listens when she tells him.

One thing that stood out to me was Grace’s lack of connection with other autistic people, especially since her mother volunteers with an autism support group. She also doesn't seem to access any online resources or read any materials by or for autistic people. Although the book's time period isn't given, because it doesn't reference social media and Grace and her friends only use their phones for talking and texting, it comes across as set before the proliferation of communities and materials by and for autistic people in the last 5-10 years. This isn’t a problem with the book per se—but I wouldn’t want anyone new to reading about autism to walk away from the book thinking that Grace’s relative isolation from other autistic people is a reasonable default state.

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Overall, though I had some concerns, they were outweighed by the realistic, sympathetic, detailed portrayal of Grace's experiences; the book clearly shows how and why our experiences can differ from neurotypical people even when we’re ostensibly in the same situations. Speaking personally, I felt the book offered a glimpse into what my life could have been like if I'd been diagnosed when younger (but not subjected to ABA, or at least pulled out of it quickly) and had a supportive neurotypical friend. Grace's awareness of herself as autistic helps her calibrate her understanding of her own needs realistically, and understand why the world is particularly difficult for her—something that would have been incredibly helpful to me at the same age.

Autistic people vary a great deal, and we'll vary in how much overlap we have with Grace. That said, I would recommend this book both for autistic people looking for something to connect with, and for non-autistic people looking to understand autistic experiences better, with a caveat: Point them toward additional resources by autistic people. Learning from and connecting with autistic people is important and very helpful for other autistic people, as well as for their family members, whether autistic or neurotypical themselves. I would recommend Kit Mead's list of autism resources as a good starting point.

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Two content notes for the book: some alcohol abuse by family members; two brief references to past ABA-like therapy; potential harm to an animal.

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What Good Representation of Autistic Characters Looks Like, Part III: Setting, Plot, and Character Growth (Plus Some Bonus Goodies)

Elizabeth Bartmess 
elizabethbartmess.com

This is a three-part series. Part I explores autistic interiority and neurology. Part II explores Diversity in Autistic Characteristics and Demographics.

In Part I of this series, I talked about how good representation of autistic characters shows interiority—characters' inner experiences and reasons for doing things—and how various aspects of autistic neurology affect our experiences, particularly sensory differences, language and speech differences, social skills and abilities, and our ability to strongly enjoy specific interests. I also briefly mentioned executive function, the usefulness of routines and structures, motor difficulties, and a few other common differences, plus some common co-conditions, and discussed how having these differences, and having to interact with others surrounding them, results in our developing skills and coming to new situations with particular expectations for what will happen.

In Part II, I talked about variation among autistic people: we each have a particular constellation of neurological characteristics that lead to different combinations of abilities and needs, which other people are often not very good at understanding. Our interactions surrounding the discrepancy between our realities and others' perceptions also affects how we think of ourselves, how we relate to others, and what skills we learn. I also talked about the variety of experiences we have relating to knowing (or not knowing) that we're autistic, and the different ways other can react to us if they know we're autistic, and how that affects our self-concepts and experiences.

Today, I'm going to bring that together with three other things: setting, plot, and character growth. I'll close with a few bonus things: some brief advice for writers, with links; a list of some common real-life aspects of autistic experience that are underrepresented in fiction; and a list of all the books and short stories I've mentioned as good representation, with descriptions, links, and (sometimes) caveats and content notes.

Setting

Good representation is aware of aspects of setting relevant to our experiences as autistic people (which may not be as relevant or salient to neurotypical people), and includes it when appropriate. This might be the setting(s) during the story, or settings that influenced the character prior to the story.

Some of those features are specifically relevant to neurological differences—for example, a character with an oversensitivity who has a difficult time with body odor is likely to have consistently bad public transit experiences in a hot city; a character with expressive speech difficulties will have different experiences if they have access to a communication device.

Sometimes they're related to demographic specifics, like the effects of attempts to socialize some autistic people into neurotypical gender roles for girls and women, or the ability to get a formal diagnosis, or access to good education. These can vary with time and place.

Sometimes they're not closely related to a character's specific neurological differences, or to demographic specifics, but are broader societal things, like whether a label exists for their differences, whether assistive communication devices are available, what the general attitudes toward disabled people are, what rights are regarded to be human rights and how consistently they're applied (or not applied) to autistic people, what laws about accessibility are and when they're followed versus not followed, whether there are disability advocacy communities and autistic communities and what they are like.

[image: Cover of the book This Alien Shore
Illustration of a white human woman with long
wavy red hair wearing a gold dress. A two-tiered
building teeming with aliens is in the background.
White text on black blocks reads "This Alien
Shore across the top of the illustration. A black
column with white text on the left reads
"C.S. Friedman".]

Some stories explore settings where many people are autistic, neurodivergent, or otherwise disabled. This Alien Shore includes multiple characters from a planet where most people are disabled; they use (voluntary) sets of facial markings to indicate particular neurologies and have formalized ways for working out competing access needs. Iwunen Interstellar Investigations, and other stories set in the same universe, includes an entire planet whose population is almost all autistic. "You Have to Follow the Rules" is a portal fantasy to a society with clear rules that support and respect particular autistic needs. Kea's Flight, the most dystopian of these, is set on a spaceship of disabled children and young adults governed by robots and neurotypical people. I would love to see more stories exploring societies of mainly autistic/disabled people; it's refreshing to read stories where it's normal, common, and supported.

In any setting, neurological and demographic characteristics may affect what access people have to helpful things, what aspects of harmful things they're likely to be subjected to, and what aspects they're able to avoid, and what expectations and strategies they've developed for managing relevant settings.

Plot

Autistic characters (almost always) keep being autistic throughout the plot. Good representation continues conveying their inner experiences, through description, narration, dialogue, or some combination; it takes into account the accumulated life experience autistic characters bring to the plot; and it shows how plot events, other characters, and setting(s) interact with the autistic characters' relevant neurological differences, skills, expectations, and strategies, including those influenced by demographic characteristics and personal history.

Regarding continuing to be autistic throughout the plot: It's beyond my scope to go deeply into this, but briefly, many autistic people are opposed to cures—and fiction that portrays cures—because they believe that to stop being autistic would involve changing them in such a fundamental way that the person they are would stop existing, and an unrelated person would exist in their place. This is not an attractive proposition to most people, and most people don't like to see this portrayed as a good thing. There are other reasons for objections to cure stories—an autistic character has lived a number of years of their life as an autistic character, experience makes brains really complex, and changing all that is not realistic; focusing on the unrealistic possibility of a cure diverts attention away from immediate, often very urgent support needs for currently-living autistic people which are already underfunded; and cure attempts and other coercive attempts to make autistic people less visibly autistic and more visibly neurotypical are extremely unpleasant to go through. Finally, stories with cure outcomes send the message to autistic readers that the good ending involves doing something they can't do.

Good representation sometimes directly addresses this, focusing on issues of autonomy, consent, and choice. In Becoming, which deals with aftereffects of an unwanted cure for a degenerative physical disability and synesthesia (though not for autistic social characteristics, which the participant retains), the cure is nonconsensual and traumatizing. In This Alien Shore, it is the disabled people who choose whether and what they want changed about themselves; in "Geometries of Belonging" and A Rational Arrangement, the mind-healers flat-out refuse to cure people who have not consented. "Twelve Seconds" looks at side effects of a cure (not for the autistic protagonist), and also has some commentary on future assistive technology; and in A Wizard Alone (New Millennium Edition) the autistic character declines to rewire his own neurology:

"The brain and the nerves and the mind I've got... even if I don't have them for some specific reason, they're mine. They're me. I've got a right to them, and I'm used to them. Besides, who knows what I might mess up if I started fiddling around?" (location 3572).

Character Growth

A character brings expectations, strategies, and their self-concept to the story; any growth they have during the story takes place against that context. They've developed those expectations, strategies, and self-concepts in response to particular experiences in particular settings, often involving interactions with other people. Their experiences have been influenced by their particular neurological characteristics and demographics, as well as other aspects of their life history.

Character growth doesn't have to be specifically about being autistic—but when it is about being autistic, good representation shows it as about being autistic—not about becoming more neurotypical.

Sometimes autistic characteristics become less apparent to other people over time. What can look to neurotypical people in real life like an autistic person becoming more neurotypical isn't; it might involve skill development on a different timeline, like learning to speak later, or it might involve learning to hide autistic traits or simulate neurotypical ones. When it's the latter, it's a strategy with costs, not a transformation. The costs might include decreased ability to learn, to interact with others, to avoid meltdowns, or to prevent burnout. It's usually adopted in response to substantial social coercion and often economic coercion. Good representation doesn't show learning to hide autistic characteristics or perform neurotypicality as becoming neurotypical, or as the ideal path to becoming a better person. (It tends not to present this as character growth at all, actually; when it shows up, it tends to be in descriptions of things the character does already that contribute to high stress levels, or to be explicit or implicit in internalized ableism; see The State of Grace, Anything But Typical, "How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps," Experimental Film.)

Other autism-related character growth might involve getting better at dealing with being autistic in a largely-neurotypical world, by building on existing strategies or developing new strategies. These strategies might be for managing environments, advocating that specific needs be met, identifying unsafe (or safe) people and situations, avoiding meltdown triggers and other stressors, or any of the other myriad things autistic people commonly have to deal with. A character's knowledge, expectations, or self-concept might also change in response to plot events: they might learn more about autism or move toward self-acceptance, for example. They might also connect with other people who share their experiences, or come up with solutions to problems that meet multiple peoples' needs. Some stories that deal with this kind of character growth: On the Edge of Gone; Experimental Film; A Boy Called Bat; Queens of Geek.

Good representation might also show some autism-related character growth for the other characters (rather than having the autistic character[s] be the only ones changing). See M is for Autism and M in the Middle; Water Bound; Al Capone Does My Shirts; "Grandmother-nai-Leylit's Cloth of Winds"; A Rational Arrangement.

Conclusion

I hope you've enjoyed this series; I know it's covered a lot of ground. To sum up:

• Autistic people have inner experiences and do things for reasons. Good representation shows those reasons as comprehensible.
• Our experiences influence who we become over time, our expectations for new situations, and the strategies we develop for dealing with them.
• Our neurological differences influence our experiences. These include various sensory, language, and social differences, as well as any special interests, other neurological differences, or co-conditions we have.
• Each autistic person has their own constellation of neurological differences (which can change over time). Our diagnostic history and demographic specifics also vary; these interact with our neurological differences to influence how we think of ourselves and how others see us.
• Other people often misunderstand what our neurological differences mean and may disbelieve us about our needs and abilities. Their responses are also influenced by how they see our demographic specifics, our personalities, etc. Our interactions with others are part of our experiences, and change who we become, our expectations, and our strategies.
• We bring all that to the particular settings we exist in, which include our immediate situations and our broader cultural contexts.
• We continue being autistic, and grow and change in various ways, including ones related to being autistic.
• Good representation reflects our range of experiences, our expectations, our strategies and skills, and shows how they interact with specific settings and plot events, and how we grow and change as a result.

Thank you for reading!

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Acknowledgements

Before I move on to the bonuses, a few acknowledgements: I'm thankful to online autistic and disabled bloggers and communities, especially #autchat participants; Disability in Kidlit and the many people who've written for it; Ada Hoffman's Autistic Book Party, without which I would have missed a lot of good books and short stories; Rabbi Ruti Regan, whose advocacy work on Twitter and at Real Social Skills has broadened and deepened the way I think about autism and disability; the University of Michigan's (now sadly-defunct) Culture and Cognition program, which taught me a lot about how children and adults learn culture; and Chavisory, whose post on invisible history provided a much better framing device than the one I'd originally come up with. Thanks also to Ada Hoffmann, Andi C. Buchanan, and Michael A. Cohn, who gave feedback on an early draft, and to Shannon Rosa for being patient and flexible.

Writing Advice

Writing good representation is not necessarily easy, but it is possible and valuable. Here's some brief advice, followed by links to more advice.

For new writers: You will get a lot of writing advice. A small amount of it will be incredibly helpful to you. Experiment. Discard what doesn't work or what's infeasible for you, and don't feel bad about doing so. If you are autistic or similarly neurodivergent, your writing processes may look different from neurotypical writers' processes; I've added some links by autistic writers on writing below.

For writers worried about writing autistic characters well: If you look back at a draft, evaluate the portrayal of the autistic character, and go "oh my god, what have I done," it means that you live in a culture that tends to endorse particular stereotypes of autistic people and discount autistic people's experiences. Writing involves doing multiple cognitively taxing things, often simultaneously; to avoid shutting down, brains will make shortcuts and compromises and temporarily substitute easy things for the complex things we actually want to wind up on the page. Sometimes those easy things are stereotypes. When they show up drafts, it doesn't mean you're a bad person. It means you're a person who's a) doing challenging things and b) has a head start on identifying what you want to fix in the next draft or do differently in the next piece.

Learn about autistic people (even if you're autistic). Don't rely primarily on non-autistic sources. This doesn't mean never use them—it just means that, overall, they're not as reliable as autistic sources, especially with respect to internal experiences.

Sensitivity readers are a good idea. It is a good idea to pay them. Sometimes an editor or publisher will find and pay for a sensitivity reader, but this is not a universal practice. Sometimes you can offer to swap critiques with an autistic writer instead of monetary payment. They may say no, and it may have nothing to do with you; sensitivity reads can be draining even when the book is quite good, or they may just be very busy. Expect that a sensitivity reader will identify issues and recommend changes. Leave enough time to make changes. If you want to thank your sensitivity reader by name in acknowledgments, make sure to ask them if it's okay first.

You will not be able to satisfy everybody, even with multiple sensitivity readers and/or beta readers. If you've struggled with this and have come up with a good way to be at peace with it that doesn't require radical personality changes, please share it; inquiring minds want to know.

General Autism Resources

• Kit Mead's autism resource collection is an extensive, curated collection of links and includes sections for multiple audiences.
• All the Weight of Our Dreams is a nonfiction anthology by autistic people of color and includes multiple pieces by autistic parents and people writing about trans/nonbinary gender identities.
• Women and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder by Sarah Hendrickx is a good resource on lifespan issues and includes some discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation.
• The weekly chats on Twitter's #autchat tag, by and for autistic and similarly neurodivergent people, have covered many topics related to our lives. [Disclosure: I co-run these chats, along with my co-mod endever*.]

Resources on Writing Autistic Characters

• Disability in Kidlit has articles on the portrayal of autism in young adult and middle grade books, many of which are relevant to other genres. They also publish book reviews and interviews with authors and cover other disabilities as well; you can search for specific content types here.
• Ada Hoffman reviews speculative fiction and poetry with autistic characters and/or by autistic authors at Autistic Book Party; Ada's blog has regular roundups of autism news, including links to commentary on media and reviews.
• Writing in the Margins has a database of sensitivity readers, including autistic ones. All readers are independent contractors who've asked to be included in the database.

Resources for Autistic Writers

• A post on #ownvoices advice for autistic writers from Rose Lemberg and Corey Alexander
• Rose Lemberg's Writing While Autistic series
• Two archived Twitter #autchats on writing autistic characters as an autistic writer: 1, 2. 

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A Partial List of Things Common in Real Life and Underrepresented in Fiction

Note that I haven't read all books with autistic characters, and there are likely good portrayals of these matters I have not encountered.

Neurological Differences

• Sensory differences and stimming: Sensory undersensitivities; stim toys.
• Language and speech differences: More non-speaking and partially speaking characters, especially as protagonists. More assistive communication devices, including for intermittently speaking characters. See also Ada's post.
• Social abilities and skills: Characters who are good with people-focused vocations.
• Special interests: Understanding people (psychology, anthropology, etc.); autism.
• Other differences: Executive function difficulties, including disorganization and autistic inertia; catatonia and other motor difficulties; alexithymia.
• Co-conditions: epilepsy; intellectual disability; ADHD; connective tissue disorders (which have common co-conditions of their own, including POTS and mast cell disorders); dyspraxia; dyscalculia; migraines; mood disorders; plurality; tic disorders; visual impairment; chronic illnesses.

Variability and Diversity

• Autistic characteristics: Inconsistent functioning; failure to recognize skills; people who are mentally categorized by others into different boxes at different times; characters with a larger number of support needs.
• Diagnosis: More on self-diagnosis and the dynamics surrounding it; characters diagnosed as children but not told until after seeking and receiving an adult diagnosis; misdiagnoses and accurate diagnoses of other conditions; people re-evaluating their lives after receiving a diagnosis; difficulty or inability to access a diagnosis; choosing not to seek a diagnosis due to concerns about discrimination.
• Gender role pressures: More for men and boys. How gender role pressures play out in romantic relationships (with same-gender partners and otherwise).
• Trans/nonbinary genders: Characters in YA novels; more portrayals of trans women.
• Race and ethnicity: More nonwhite characters in general; autistic communities and disability communities being largely white, failing to include issues important to minority communities, failing to take into account the effects of racism when looking at mistreatment of nonwhite autistic people (especially with respect to child abuse and police violence); unequal allocation of resources for special education, providers lacking knowledge of cultural specifics.
• Sexual orientation: Non-straight characters in straight relationships; aromantic characters; more non-straight men.
• Other things: More intersectionality (characters who differ from stereotypes in more ways than one); more older autistic characters, including elderly ones; more portrayals of autistic parenthood; more low-socioeconomic-status characters; more physically disabled autistic characters; autistic characters with non-psychic superhuman powers.

Settings

• Special ed settings / characters with special ed experience
• Institutional settings / characters who've been institutionalized in the past
• Higher education settings
• Effects of disability-related laws and policies
• Access to supports: Accommodations at school and work, characters with support workers, service and emotional support animals.
• More societies, groups, and communities of autistic and other disabled people! (See this thread for more thoughts)

Plots

• Various kinds of mistreatment that occur in real life (including sexual abuse, which is extremely high for intellectually disabled autistic women in particular; domestic violence)
• More romances and friendships with more than one autistic/similarly neurodivergent/disabled character
• Sagas looking at lifespan changes and/or aging

Character Growth

• More character growth unrelated to being autistic
• Recovery from burnout
• Learning to recognize your limits
• Learning to self-advocate
• Learning to identify and avoid harmful people
• Learning to manage excessive/painful empathy

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List of Books and Short Stories with Good Representation

Disclaimers: I haven't read all works with autistic characters; there were over 70 books I didn't even manage to look at. If a story's not on this list, that doesn't necessarily mean I thought it wasn't good representation; I may just not have read it, or not have had enough to say about it to warrant inclusion.

I've included some stories I have reservations about because they got some things really right; those reservations are listed in the notes. I've added content notes when I thought content was particularly likely to be triggering to some readers (mostly focusing on autism-related content). I may have missed some things that are major issues for you.

Unless otherwise stated, the protagonist is autistic.

Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko (middle grade). Narrated by Moose, the brother of the autistic character Natalie, and set on Alcatraz Island in the 1930s, where their father works. Natalie's mother has subjected her to multiple therapies to try to "cure" her; part of the plot revolves around trying to get a school for younger girls to admit her. Moose is generally good at recognizing when Natalie's being treated unfairly and pushes back against it. I would not recommend this book for an autistic kid due to frequent ableism; I do recommend it for how it portrays interiority for a non-point-of-view autistic character. Later books in the series are less good about calling out ableist treatment and sometimes appear to endorse it. CN: harmful therapies; ableist language and treatment; infantilization. Goodreads page; Jessica Mulqueen's review at Disability in Kidlit.

Anything But Typical by Nora Raleigh Baskin (middle grade). Jason Blake is a twelve-year-old fiction writer and special ed student who develops an online friendship with a girl via their shared interests in writing. I have multiple reservations about this book: Jason jumps to the conclusion that she's his girlfriend without her knowledge or input, and the text doesn't address it. When he meets her, he learns she's blind, but her disability seems to disappear after that. The book uses another disability (dwarfism) as a metaphor for autism (Jason is writing a story about a dwarf named Bennu and his decision to be cured or not be cured). Jason explicitly addresses the reader as neurotypical, which may feel odd for an autistic reader. He also lists possible causes for autism—some of which are clearly intended to be read as implausible—and the list includes vaccinations, and it's not explicitly stated that that's inaccurate. I've included it because it's the only example I've found of difficulty meeting gender expectations for boys, and because he talks about his experience with being diagnosed as a child. Overall, it's a realistic portrayal of an autistic kid with substantial attention to interiority. Goodreads page; Emily Brooks' review at Disability in Kidlit.

"Becoming" by Julie Nováková (SFF). A physically disabled, non-neurotypical character who voluntarily became the control node of a space station is "rescued" and cured of her physical disability without consent. Some years later, she's given the option to reverse the cure. She's synesthetic, detail-oriented, and "socially incompetent"; I read her as autistic for those reasons. CN: Nonconsensual cure. Ada Hoffmann's review.

A Boy Called Bat by Elana K. Arnold (kids' chapter book). Bat's veterinarian mother brings home a baby skunk; he tries to convince her to let him keep it. A charming book with good interiority. Bat's father has Chinese ancestry (confirmed in the sequel Bat and the Waiting Game). Goodreads page; reviews by Nicole Panteleakos and her ten-year-old goddaughter Meadow on Disability in Kidlit. [Disclosure: I was hired by the editor to sensitivity-read educators' pamphlets for both books.]

Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson (SFF). A town of scientists using advanced technology to watch aliens on other planets is suddenly put under quarantine. The autistic character, eleven-year-old Tess, has multiple scenes though she's not a protagonist. CN: Stalking, violence, violent death (not of the autistic character). Goodreads page; Ada Hoffmann's review.

“The Book of How to Live” by Rose Lemberg (SFF). Efronia is a skilled artificer and inventor working at a university. She's an outsider in more ways than one—in addition to being autistic, she's magicless and from a distant part of the country. A story about exploitation, broken promises, common cause, and hope. Ada Hoffmann's brief review. [Disclosure: I know Rose online and we've had a number of conversations about autism; they've also written questions for an online chat I run.]

Carry the Ocean by Heidi Cullinan (romance). Autistic college student Emmet falls in love with Jeremey, a recent high school grad struggling with anxiety and depression. Nice examples of accommodations by Emmet's family and within their relationship. It's mentioned that Emmet's aunt, who is also autistic, is different from him. I had some reservations: in parts, the book reads like a how-to manual for disabled teens on gay male dating; there's a quadriplegic character who fits an "angry crip" stereotype; and there's some uncomfortable ableism by Emmet toward other disabled characters. CN: ableism including the r-word, internalized ableism, homophobia. Goodreads page; Willaful's review.

A Desperate Fortune by Susanna Kearsley (historical fiction/romance). Sara Thomas is a codebreaker hired to break the cipher on a 300-year-old journal of historical interest. Alternates between sections of the (decoded) journal and Sara's romance with Luc, a neighbor with an autistic brother and niece. CN: Brief references to ableism by treatment providers. Goodreads page.

"Difference of Opinion" by Meda Kahn (SFF). Keiya, a nonspeaking space station janitor and former anti-eugenics activist, has a relationship with a co-worker. A vivid, memorable story about dehumanization and eugenics. Strongly recommended. Nonwhite bisexual protagonist; F/F romance. CN: Eugenics; dehumanization; medical abuse; removal of a communication device; self-injury; exploitation of disabled workers; cooptation for "inspirational" purposes; forced memory erasure. Goodreads page.

Experimental Film by Gemma Files (horror). Lois, an older autistic parent of an autistic child and a former film critic and teacher, discovers historically important film footage. Strongly recommended. CN: Horror; ableism; a lot of internalized ableism; references to past human sacrifices of the elderly and disabled; a magical blindness trope near the end. Goodreads page; Ada Hoffmann's review.

Failure to Communicate by Kaia Sønderby (SFF). Born in a future where eugenics has eliminated most neurodivergent people, Xandri Corelel negotiates with aliens using her learned skills at reading nonverbal-behavior-as-a-second-language. Bisexual nonwhite protagonist with synesthesia, low-key polyamorous romance subplot, supportive and accommodating friends and coworkers. First in a series. Strongly recommended. CN: references to past child abuse including abusive therapies, a section near the end with explicit visual descriptions of historical war crimes. Goodreads page; RoAnna Sylver's review.

"Geometries of Belonging" by Rose Lemberg (SFF). Parét, a non-autistic mind-healer, is asked to cure an autistic genderqueer adolescent, Dedéi (who he does not cure because Dedéi does not consent). Dedéi has notable language differences and motor difficulties, and a special interest in magic. CN: Fictional gendered slurs; child abuse; averted filicide. Ada Hoffmann's review. [Disclosure: I know Rose online and we've had a number of conversations about autism; they've also written questions for an online chat I run.]

"Grandmother-nai-Leylit's Cloth of Winds" by Rose Lemberg (SFF). Non-autistic protagonist with a mostly nonspeaking autistic child. A complex story about family, travel, finding a place for oneself, and gender and gender transition. All nonwhite characters.  Ada Hoffmann's brief review; Rose's story notes. [Disclosure: I know Rose online and we've had a number of conversations about autism; they've also written questions for an online chat I run.]

Harmonic Feedback by Tara Kelly (young adult). Drea, a sixteen-year-old with a special interest in sound design, moves to a new area, makes friends, and has a romance. CN: Drug abuse, ableism (including some by the protagonist) including the r-word, internalized ableism. Goodreads page; Mary Wilson's review at Disability in Kidlit.

"How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps," by A. Merc Rustad (SFF; link is to a podcast; scroll down for text). An amazing, beautiful story about many things, including gender/species dysphoria, friendship, and depression. It captures a particular sense of not fitting in extremely effectively. Strongly recommended. CN: Suicidal ideation, brief scene of psychological abuse. Goodreads page; Ada Hoffmann's review. [Disclosure: I know Merc online.]

"Inappropriate Behavior" by Pat Murphy (SFF; link is to a podcast; scroll down for text). Twelve-year-old Annie operates a remote mining robot. A shipwreck survivor washes up on her island and she must convince someone to rescue him. Sharp critique of the pressure to act neurotypical. CN: normalizing therapy. Ada Hoffmann's short review.

"Iron Aria" by Merc Rustad (SFF). Kyru, an artist with metallurgical magic and difficulty with expressive speech, leaves home and accompanies an army to a mountain that needs his help. CN: Misgendering. Ada Hoffman's short review. [Disclosure: I know Merc online.]

Iwunen Interstellar Investigations by Bogi Takács (SFF). Multiple autistic characters on a planet of autistic people have adventures. The master list of episodes includes this and other stories in the same universe. The plot can be difficult to follow; readers may find it easier to start with some short stories or the concepts page. Multiple trans/nonbinary characters. Ada Hoffmann's review of "Iwunen Interstellar Investigations (Prologue Season)." [Disclosure: I know Bogi online and we've had a number of conversations about autism; e has also written questions for an online chat I run.]

Kea's Flight by Erika Hammerschmidt and John C. Ricker (young adult). Multiple autistic and neurodivergent people on a ship of disabled children run by robots and neurotypical people. I have a couple major reservations. It invisibilizes the higher-support-needs kids on the ship; the story and main characters seem to forget about them, and don't involve them in decisions about how to ensure they receive support. The protagonist laughs at her also-autistic boyfriend's word-retrieval issues. Characters have a variety of sexual orientations, including an autistic secondary character who is an asexual lesbian.  CN: ableism; also see reservations mentioned above. Goodreads page; Ada Hoffmann's review; interview with Erika Hammerschmidt.

M in the Middle by the students of Limpsfield Grange School (a school for girls with communication and interaction difficulties) and Vicky Martin (middle grade). The sequel to M is for Autism (see below). M deals with an uncaring friend, family difficulties, ableism by her teachers, and stressful life events. Revolves around M's struggle with and increasing acceptance of being autistic. I have a major reservation: M develops an obsession with a boy she knows and downloads over 20,000 pictures of him onto her laptop; the only character who thinks it's inappropriate is the principal, and his objection is portrayed as ableism. Autistic traits don't make it okay to stalk people, and it's jarring that an otherwise very good book falls down on this. CN: references to abusive grandmother; exploitation by a friend; ableism; internalized ableism. Goodreads page; review at Books on Autism.

M is for Autism by the students of Limpsfield Grange School (a school for girls with communication and interaction difficulties) and Vicky Martin (middle grade). M struggles at school and eventually receives an autism diagnosis; she talks with a helpful counselor, reads about autism, and becomes more comfortable with herself. Vivid descriptions of her experiences. CN: Ableism; internalized ableism. Goodreads page; Books on Autism's review.

On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis (young adult SFF). After a comet hits the Earth, Denise struggles to get herself and her mother a place on a generation ship while looking for her missing sister. Denise is portrayed complexly and realistically, including with respect to internalized ableism. Part-Dutch, part-Surinamese Black teenage protagonist. CN: Drug and alcohol abuse, ableism, internalized ableism. Goodreads page; Ada Hoffmann's review at Disability in Kidlit; interview with the author at Disability in Kidlit. [Disclosure: Corinne co-runs Disability in Kidlit, which I've written several articles for, and also referred a client to me for a sensitivity read.]

Queens of Geek by Jen Wilde (young adult). Charlie and Taylor, two Australian teenage girls, attend a Comic-Con-style convention in the United States along with their guy friend Jamie. Charlie (not autistic) is promoting her first movie along with her ex-boyfriend Reese. Taylor was recently diagnosed with autism and is falling for Jamie; she also meets another autistic girl at the conference. A pleasant, heartwarming exploration of Charlie and Taylor's experiences, friendships, and relationships. CN: emotionally abusive antagonist. Goodreads page; Kim Broomall's review at Disability in Kidlit.

A Rational Arrangement by L. Rowyn (SFF romance). A Regency-style M/M/F polyamorous romance on a secondary world. Wisteria, the female protagonist, is autistic. Her business-like, thorough approach to proposing a marriage contract is played for humor, though the humor comes from the disjunction between social expectations and Wisteria's sensible approach, which I thought worked well. I had some reservations: the nobility are served by giant cats who the humans colonized and made human-style sentient, and the text doesn't question this. Wisteria shows a love interest her attempt at a smile and he laughs at it. Her autistic characteristics seem to be limited to social interaction and body language. CN: Ableism, especially from family members; colonialism; a torture scene (not of the autistic character). Goodreads page; Ada Hoffmann's review.

The Real Boy by Anne Ursu (middle grade SFF). Oscar and his new friend Callie investigate a mystery. A favorite with many autistic readers I know; see Corinne Duyvis' review linked below for all the reasons this book is great. If the major identity-related plot twist makes you very uncomfortable, keep reading; it will get better. CN: Ableism, internalized ableism. Goodreads page; Corinne Duyvis' review at Disability in Kidlit; interview with the author at Disability in Kidlit.

Rogue by Lyn Miller-Lachmann (middle grade). After being expelled from school for hitting a bully, Kiara learns she's autistic. She works to make friends, including with a neighbor boy who fools her into helping procure drug-making supplies. She has a special interest in the X-Men and believes herself to be autistic from a mutation caused by "toxic chemicals"; her father says that isn't true, but she continues believing it. Protagonist's mother is El Salvadorian. CN: Drugs; child abuse (not of the autistic character); bullying; physical violence by the protagonist; exploitation of protagonist's naiveté; ableist language including the r-word. Goodreads page; Samantha Stanko's review at Disability in Kidlit; interview with the author at Disability in Kidlit.

"The Scrape of Tooth and Bone" by Ada Hoffmann (SFF). Lillian Howe brings her robot-fixing expertise and secret mission of sabotage to a fossil dig, where she pursues a relationship with the lovely widow Mrs. Hattie Bond Cunningham. Steampunk with ghosts and dinosaurs; themes of difficulty navigating gender roles and social expectations. Goodreads page. [Disclosure: Ada is in my writing group, and we've had a number of conversations about autism; she also helped write questions for an online chat I run, and I used her review website extensively while doing research for this series.]

The Someday Birds by Sally J. Pla (middle grade). Charlie, an (undiagnosed) autistic boy with diagnosed OCD tries to spot every one of a list of birds during a cross-country road trip with his siblings and a family friend. They are on their way to visit Charlie's father, who is in the hospital for medical treatment for a head injury he got in Afghanistan. Charlie's mother was Mexican. Goodreads page; Bogi Takács' review; interview with the author at Disability in Kidlit.

The State of Grace by Rachael Lucas (young adult). Grace, a high school student, deals with common teenage issues like dating, friendships, and family conflict. Excellent portrayal of interiority; strongly recommended. CN: some ableism, brief references to harmful childhood therapy, alcohol abuse. Goodreads page; Lorna's review at CrankyAutistic.

"They Jump Through Fires" by Gabriela Santiago (horror; link is to a podcast; scroll down for text). An autistic woman keeps vigil over her dead girlfriend. Protagonist of Mexican descent. CN: Graphic description of a decomposing body; body horror with rabbits. Ada Hoffmann's brief review.

This Alien Shore by C.S. Friedman (SFF). Kio Masada works to track a dangerous computer virus to its source. Masada and some other characters are from a planet where most inhabitants are disabled; contains interesting discussion about disability, cure, and accommodations. A parallel plot involves a teenage girl with biomodifications she doesn't fully understand. CN: abuse, ableism, references to eugenics, a weird bit where Masada thinks about whether autistic people can actually love (though the text seems to rebut this immediately). Goodreads page; Ada Hoffmann's review.

This Other World by A.C. Buchanan (SFF). Novella about a menopausal woman living in an alien culture, preparing for a major life change, and working as an architectural engineer. There's a mystery and a war. Goodreads page; Ada Hoffmann's review.

"Touch of Tides" by Luna Lindsey (SFF). A synesthetic xenobiologist on the moon Europa explores underwater life. Interview with the author.

"Twelve Seconds" by Tina Gower (SFF). Howard, a police station employee, uncovers peculiarities in records which connect with a plotline where a (non-autistic) coworker undergoes an experimental cure for PTSD. Howard uses augmented reality goggles for sensory overload; they also give him social information and instructions. CN: Attempted cure (not of autistic character). Available in the 2014 Campbellian Anthology (Goodreads page); Ada Hoffmann's review.

"Unauthorized Access" by An Owomoyela (SFF). An autistic hacker just released from prison for uncovering corruption gets pulled into uncovering corruption again. Ada Hoffmann's brief review.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon (SFF). Aster, a physician's assistant and slave on a generation ship, investigates a family mystery. Queer black intersex protagonist. Strongly recommended. CN: Extensive abuse, violence, and degradation, predominantly race-based; a suicide attempt; ableism. Goodreads page. I don't know of any reviews from an autistic perspective, but here is a review by Amal El-Mohtar.

Water Bound by Christine Feehan (romance). Rikki, a woman with a magical ability to control water, rescues a mysterious stranger who helps defend her from a dangerous stalker from her past. Amazing descriptions of sensory enjoyment and fun stimming with water magic. Note that the love interest is written to have many abuser red flags, and attacks Rikki while he's confused and disoriented after a concussion. Rikki's friends are reasonably concerned and discuss with her about whether he's taking advantage of her; she argues for her right to make her own decisions. CN: Some ableist language; abuser red flags; flashback scene to a house fire that killed Rikki's parents and nearly killed her; stalking; violence. Goodreads page; Willaful's brief review.

A Wizard Alone (New Millennium Edition) by Diane Duane. Kit and Nita, the two (non-autistic) protagonists, work to rescue Darryl, an eleven-year-old autistic magical prodigy. After feedback from autistic fans, Duane rewrote Darryl's portrayal significantly for this edition. Black autistic character. CN: ableist language. Alyssa Hillary's review comparing the original and New Millennium editions at Disability in Kidlit. The Goodreads page sends you to the wrong edition; for the New Millennium Edition, go here.

"You Have to Follow the Rules" by Ada Hoffmann. Annalee, a child with a special interest in Star Wars, discovers doors to another world at a fan convention. Interesting dynamics surrounding whose social rules are privileged.

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You Look Different in Real Life by Jennifer Castle. Justine and four other teens, including the autistic character Rory, were in documentary films at ages six and eleven; now at age sixteen and being filmed for a follow-up, Justine is trying to figure out her place in life. Does a very good job portraying interiority through observations by another character. CN: five years before the book begins, the protagonist pretended to be friends with the autistic character and then dumped her (though the book handles this sensitively and effectively). Goodreads page; Corinne Duyvis' review at Disability in Kidlit; interview with the author at Disability in Kidlit.

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