CinemAbility: A Review

CinemAbility poster via Amazon.com
[image: Movie poster featuring a shadowy
photo of a person in a wheelchair, seen from
behind. Headshot of the actors Jane Seymour,
Ben Affleck, Jamie Foxx, Marlee Matlin,
William H. Macy, and Geena Davis are
arranged in a diagonal over the wheelchair
user, above large white text reading
"CinemAbility The Art of Inclusion."]

Maxfield Sparrow
unstrangemind.com

CinemAbility: The Art of Inclusion (2018)
Directed by Jenni Gold, Leomark Studios
Closed Captions

I recently and eagerly watched the new documentary CinemAbility: The Art of Inclusion via an Amazon rental. Although I have a couple of complaints, I don’t want to lead with them because the documentary overall was amazing and has been sorely needed. For those who only read articles' opening paragraphs: you must see this film! You will not regret it.

The documentary was filled with interview clips—actors, directors, casting directors, academics. I apologize in advance because I won’t have the names of some people. While the documentary had closed captioning and Marlee Matlin had an interpreter, one accommodation typically missing from documentaries was also lacking in this one: identifying the speakers every time they come onscreen. I have prosopagnosia (face blindness), so in a film with scores of different speakers I really need their identity to be included every time they appear or I will be lost as far as who is speaking at least half the time, if not more.

The opening clips centered around an academic, Martin F. Norden, a communications professor who teaches film and media studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Norden’s 1994 book, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies, appears to have strongly informed the entire documentary in form and content. Theories from his book were used to lay the groundwork, demonstrating the pre-existing stereotypes that cinema needs to work past if films and television are going to depict disability in an honest and realistic way that does not harm or diminish disabled people in the name of entertainment.

The documentary also goes through a chronological history of disability, interwoven with interviews, facts, and opinions, and that chronology began at the same time as Norden discussed the three biggest tropes or storyline stereotypes about disabled people: the Saintly Sage, the Sweet Innocent, and the Obsessive Avenger.

The Saintly Sage is usually elderly. A classic example is the old, blind hermit in Bride of Frankenstein (a character who was also spoofed in Mel Brook’s comic satire, Young Frankenstein -- not mentioned in the documentary, but I couldn’t help thinking of it, especially as I’ve never seen the original Bride of Frankenstein film). The old man can’t see that Frankenstein is a monster and treats him like a human being until the hunters come looking for him and tell the hermit that he’s been sharing dinner with a monster.

The Saintly Sage is not a compliment—it is using a disabled character as a plot device to illustrate a point or advance the script. Saintly Sage is the disability version of another trope often called the “Magical Negro.” Someone the audience views as “exotic” comes into the story solely to assist the hero with life wisdom inaccessible to “normals.” Another similar trope is the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” who is not a fully-formed character and only exists to help the male protagonist find meaning and purpose in his own life.

The film digresses a moment to show some clips of a homeless, disabled street beggar being used to comic effect while the narrator (Jane Seymour) tells us that this clip filmed by Thomas Edison may be the first depiction of disability ever in film. The image is iconic after all these years of being repeated again and again in much the same tone Edison originally depicted.

The Sweet Innocent is usually a beautiful young woman or a child. This is the prototype for the “good disabled person” that so many of us feel near-continual pressure to be. The Sweet Innocent is kind and good, usually to the level of being completely one-dimensional. They are sexless and childlike and too good to be real. At the end of the movie the Sweet Innocent is usually rewarded for being a good disabled person by receiving a miracle cure.

Several examples of the Sweet Innocent were depicted but the one that most caught my attention was from the movie Heidi where the Sweet Innocent in the wheelchair is taught to walk by Shirley Temple’s Heidi, another character too sweet and good to be true. This is one of my earliest memories of a wheelchair user being depicted in a movie I watched as a child. That illustrates how damaging these stereotypes and tropes can be. Movies are many people’s first education about what disability is, what it means, how we should respond to disability, and so on.

The Obsessive Avenger is the flip side of the Sweet Innocent—the “bad disabled person” who gets punished instead of cured. Some examples include the Phantom of the Opera, The Wax Museum, and Speed. Although not depicted in the documentary, I realized that many of the villains in Batman are also Obsessive Avengers. The Obsessive Avenger becomes disabled and is so infuriated by it that they devote their life to seeking revenge for the wrong done to them and typically die by the end of the movie.

The bad disabled person off-screen is the one who is not always cheerful and smiling and sometimes is angry. I think a lot of Autistic activists get socially punished (or much worse!) because we are viewed as “bad disabled people” for feeling angry about some things, for speaking up for our rights instead of being grateful and happy all the time. Sometimes it feels like all a person has to do to be the “bad disabled person” is mention one thing that needs to be changed.

I really do feel like these movie tropes have trickled through our society, shaping ideas like inspiration porn and so-called mercy killings that affect Autistics and all disabled people. CinemAbility is an important film for Autistic people even though the word “autism” is never spoken in the documentary and there are only a few clips, one to two seconds long each, from movies and TV about or including Autistic people. The ones I noticed were: Rain Man (which went by so fast I didn’t even catch it until I saw it listed in the end credits!), Temple Grandin (which somehow got listed twice in the end credits), and a quick image of Max, from Parenthood. If you add in other developmental disabilities, there was Charly, I Am Sam, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Life Goes On, and Forrest Gump.

That’s my biggest complaint—how under-represented developmental disabilities were in the documentary. I did some thinking about why that might be and I have a few thoughts on that:

First, I think we had to be “patched in” to be there at all because, as I mentioned, the documentary seemed to have heavily relied on Martin F. Norden’s work and his book was strictly about physical disabilities. The only developmentally disabled character who got any real air time at all was Corky, played by Chris Burke, from Life Goes On, an ABC television show that aired from 1989 to 1993. I watched it when it aired and enjoyed it. Chris Burke, who is also a Down syndrome activist and singer, is a solid actor and Corky was a great character. I didn’t realize until I watched the documentary that the show was made for Chris Burke.

Burke had written to ABC, saying that he was an actor with Down syndrome and wanted a chance to be in a show. Executives and casting staff were charmed by Burke’s friendly and direct request and built Life Goes On just for him. It was ground-breaking television as far as depicting someone with a developmental disability living a happy and fulfilled life.

The documentary shows a clip of a mother of someone with Down syndrome (as I asked my screen why they were talking to a parent and not a person with Down syndrome), Gail Williamson, who said, “The more images we put in TV and film, the more opportunities there are for people to see what Down syndrome is and have a better understanding of it.” She went on to mention that the Down syndrome community had a definite before Corky / after Corky effect: doctors started telling mothers that their baby has Down syndrome but they shouldn’t despair because their child might turn out to be like Corky.

That’s where representation gets sticky, of course. The film didn’t talk about the “super crip” phenomenon at all (although it did, very briefly, mention inspiration porn.) I can’t help wondering how many people felt oppressed by the pressure to be “another Corky” just as so many of us Autistics feel pressure to be “another Temple.” Telling mothers that their child could be another Corky might make the mothers feel better, but at what cost for their children?

There was a short segment about Lauren Potter, an actor from Glee with Down syndrome, and how she grew stronger as an actor because they trusted her to be competent. There was also a short segment about RJ Mitte, who has another developmental disability: cerebral palsy. He was hired to play Walter, Jr. on Breaking Bad because the show wanted to represent reality rather than having an abled actor portray cerebral palsy.

The movie Forrest Gump had a fairly long segment in the documentary, but I noticed it barely grazed upon Forrest’s disability and spent nearly all the airtime focused on Lieutenant Dan’s story arc of becoming disabled, being angry, coming to terms with disability, and going on to have a vibrant, thriving life. It was a great analysis of Lieutenant Dan’s character, but I wanted that spotlight turned on Forrest, too. As I say, what content there was about autism and other developmental disabilities was pretty thin on the ground and added in, since the book that set the framework and tone for the documentary was only about physical disabilities.

Another reason for the low representation of people like me in the documentary is general societal attitudes and assumptions found in the larger disability community. Many times I have been spending time in communities of cross-disability activists and felt alienated as people unthinkingly (at least I’m really hoping they didn’t realize an Autistic was listening to them) talked about how worthy they are because “our minds are fine.” Sometimes the talk even goes so far as, “if there were something wrong with my mind I’d kill myself.” The larger disability community can be unfriendly to Autistics or simply doesn’t think about us enough to remember that we are part of the movement, too.

And part of that is our own fault for isolating ourselves in Autistic or Neurodiversity or Asperger’s spaces and ignoring the larger disability community. We really need to make the effort to reach out past our own issues because we risk being left out of disability representation that way. We also miss the opportunity to learn from a long-standing and results-achieving community when we isolate. We could get our own game so much more on point than it already is by spending more time actively studying what activists and advocates with other disabilities are doing. Finally, we’re cutting ourselves off from potential friendships with people of other neurotypes who care about accommodations and acceptance.

Along the lines of feeling excluded in subtle ways, Marlee Matlin (who I love so much) said, “Don’t look at us as different. We have the same brains. We have the same hearts. We all live and breathe the same air. At the end of the day, just be more open-minded and have passion, not sympathy.” This is such a beautiful message and I laud it—but it’s not entirely true. I don’t have the same brain as non-Autistic people.

That’s just it: I’m neurodivergent. I have a beautiful Autistic brain and it’s both my super power and my downfall. As I saw Neurobeautiful say in the Facebook forum for the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network recently: “most superpowers turn into disabilities in an environment not built to accommodate them.” You may call it a minor thing that Marlee Matlin said we all have the same brains, but it did break my heart a little bit.

That said, I do think we have more in common with other disabled people than we do with neurotypical people who are not disabled. Danny Woodburn, an actor who is a Little Person, (side note: when Googling to see if I should capitalize Little Person, the first site I found was, coincidentally, a conversation between the actor Danny Woodburn and Roger Ebert) said something in CinemAbility that any of us could, sadly, easily imagine being said to the mother of an Autistic child: “Even when I was a baby in the late 60s, early 70s, people would approach my mom and think that she did something horrible in the face of God to deserve a child like me.”

Here’s to working together with our siblings in the larger disability community, to gaining more and better representation in the disability community and society at large, and to being part of the fight for a world where we are viewed as human beings—not plot devices, not inspiration, and not punishments and burdens.

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Sesame Street's Julia: What An Inclusive World Should Look Like

[image: partial view of Sara, who has dark hair in pigtails and is
wearing a dark pink shirt, smiling. She sits with a Julia doll,
holding onto the doll’s hand. The Julia doll has bright orange hair
 in pigtails and green eyes, looks happy, and is wearing a pink shirt.]

Sara Liss

I wish that Julia the Muppet from Sesame Street had existed when I was a toddler and first learning (not very successfully) to interact with other kids.

I was desperate to play with someone other than my baby sister, her baby playmates, and our family friends. I didn’t know how to connect with the other kids my age, and most of them preferred for me to stay away. One or two of the girls at my preschool either liked me or took pity on me, on their own or with adult encouragement, and were my sometimes-playmates. (I don’t think my pre-school teachers assigned them to me as playmates, the way my teachers did every year from pre-K to 4th grade.)

I can say, though, that the only social interaction was the time my not-quite-friend Melissa invited me to play with her outside and then told off another girl who didn’t want Melissa to play with me. I guard that memory carefully, clinging to it as I try to forget the times I stood at the play kitchen or sand table minutes after the other girls had used them, trying to pretend I wasn’t alone.

I can remember most of the Sesame Street episodes and skits broadcast between 1989 and 2000. I’m 30 years old, and my youngest sibling is 23, and my brother’s occupational therapist and later babysitter had a burning hatred of Barney, which means I know the Sesame Street songs from that era word-for-word almost two decades later.

When I was a child, there were no openly autistic faces to us to latch on to as role models. But Sesame Street, so progressive that it moved its new programming to HBO to keep social conservatives from trying to kill the show entirely, was no stranger to disability even then. Linda, a Deaf woman who debuted on the show in 1973, was already teaching children how to sing in ASL back in 1976. Tarah, who had osteogenesis imperfecta, was showing off her skills as a wheelchair ballerina in 1993. But there still wasn’t anyone on Sesame Street with disabilities that also affected their minds.

(In the world of disability inclusion, disability is always physical first and mental/cognitive second, unless there’s been another mass shooting and we’re desperate to find something besides a gun to blame.).

When I was a child, Sesame Street coded characters as autistic—the Count, of course, and also sometimes Bert. Most autistic kids identified with the Count. (Personally, I found him terrifying, and may or may not have run away from him and his scary mountain and scary bats at least once. He wasn’t quite as scary as Ursula from The Little Mermaid, though, so I still have his “The Lambaba” word-perfect two decades later.)

I myself adored Bert, and, according to family lore, actually teethed on his nose. Most of all, what resounded with me was his bemusement at Ernie’s version of logic, which made literal sense and was reasonable from Ernie’s point of view, but always led to the wrong conclusion. (The cookies in bed sketch is a classic example.)

I had another kind of kinship with Kermit the Frog, who wasn’t a resident of Sesame Street but appeared in enough skits as a reporter covering Fairy Tale News for me to claim him for this essay. I was drawn to his high anxiety levels, his endless attempts to get everyone to just listen to him, to get everything in order for once in their lives, and the way heightened emotions stole his words and left him with screaming, flailing, and flapping as his only way to communicate.

But Kermit was never coded as autistic, not as far as I can tell. He was rather a giant ball of anxiety, almost certainly depressed, in an on-and-off relationship with an amazing woman who could have been a great partner for literally anyone else. (This is not an essay on the many, many wonders of Miss Piggy. Nor is it an essay on how the stereotype of a hen-picked husband needs to be rended from tip to toe and thrown to the piranhas. I can write that essay some other time, if anyone is interested, but I’m currently wearing my Joyful Autistic hat, and the Raging Feminist one will have to wait.)

Julia is different from all those other characters. Julia is openly autistic and doesn’t apologize for it. She has a home on Sesame Street and doesn’t need to be “fixed” to keep it. She’s not a single obsession, a savant, or a machine who needs to be programmed with the “right” words or social skills.

I look at Julia and see an autistic girl—an actual GIRL—who STIMS! and who is EMOTIONAL, so much so that her body can’t contain it! who USES HER BODY TO COMMUNICATE HER FEELINGS! She doesn’t need speech to express herself, and can say more with her body than words can contain, even when the NTs foreign to her world don’t understand what she means. She’s silly and goofy and strange and people LIKE HER FOR IT.

My new friend Julia has *real* friends, friends who didn’t need anyone to tell them that Julia was lonely because she was different and needed a special buddy to help her feel the same as everyone else.

Her friends think of her as an equal, not as a Special Task the grown-ups trust them with. Her friends don’t exploit her oddities for their own amusement or make fun of her in ways they know she can’t understand. They don’t leave her in favor of her “normal” friends when she breaks social taboos, and don’t leave her when she can’t answer their questions about who she is, or how she thinks, or why she can’t be like everybody else no matter how hard she tries. Her friends are the non-disabled peers I loved and followed as a child but could never seem to keep, the people I broke by getting too close when I was hopelessly broken.

It wasn’t until my second year of college that I found friends who embraced me and the autistic parts of my soul but weren’t autistic themselves. Calling them NT is probably a stretch. I’m pretty sure there’s something neurodivergent about people who creep along public streets in broad daylight pretending to be a raptor, complete with sound effects, and completely sober; and all of us had trouble passing in so-called normal culture.

They were and are more like me than any non-autistic person than I’d ever known. They love my flappy rants about administrative law at New Yorker speed, the same way I love their shared horror of the Twilight movies. We’re entertained, sometimes enraptured, frequently clueless, and sooner or later, baffled at why we’re still talking. They’ll probably never know why I’m so obsessed with the Chevron doctrine, and I will never understand what possessed them to go to the midnight release of the first Twilight movie. And that’s okay. We’re oddballs, but that’s a feature, not a bug.

I can’t be certain, but: I don’t think I’d have had to spend 20 years waiting to find friends who could love my autistic soul—but not have their own to match—had I met Julia the same day I met Big Bird, Mr. Snuffleupagus, and Elmo. I don’t think I’d have gone 29 years without being diagnosed, making three separate trips to Albany to be evaluated, just so I could prove a point. I don’t think my dad would shy away from me every time I talk about being autistic because he’d thought my mind was "fine" and never considered my social issues might be so “bad” I needed a disorder to describe them. And I don’t think my first female fictional friend would have been Baby Bop just because she was a girl, and there weren’t any girls on Sesame Street.

Sesame Workshop is finally teaching kids that autistic people are people worth the same as anyone else, even if their minds aren’t "fine." Her Muppet friends Elmo and Abby Cadabby know that she’s their equal. She can love and be loved without trying to make her life a game of pretend, a game there’s no way for her to win. She speaks with her loud hands and loud arms and loud body. She speaks in the wordless sounds she makes and the rest of the world tries to interpret, sometimes correctly, sometimes wrongly, and sometimes looking for meaning that words can’t express at all.

There’s a lot of Julia in me. I see her and I want to keep her safe from a world that sees difference and tries to fix it, even when there’s nothing to be fixed. I want to protect her from a world that demands conformity at any price, and punishes us when hurting ourselves is the only way to comply.

At the same time, I look at Julia and see a girl like me in the safest place I’ve ever known, who sees and does things differently and who isn’t scolded for it. I see adults who see her as a person, a disabled person, autistic through and through, and still knows she exists for her own sake. I see a fictional world that’s taught tens of millions of young children over generations numbers and letters and skipping rhymes and phrases like “please” and “thank you.” I see a powerful force in children’s education telling Americans everywhere to welcome me as I am. I see a world that’s always tried to include everyone, desperately trying to teach us to better people, and see that in this better world, there’s a place for me.

I wish that when I was little, I’d seen a girl like Julia on Sesame Street, and seen Sesame Street embrace her. I’m not a child anymore, but I’m so, so glad that she’s here now, and here for me.

----

This article was previously published at kpagination.wordpress.com.

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Knowing Why Is Everything: An Interview With Editor Elizabeth Bartmess on Adult-Diagnosed Autistic Perspectives

Sarah Kurchak
www.riskyfuel.com

The Knowing Why book cover
[image: Book cover with a black background,
with silhouettes of people of all sizes
and a dog, in a rainbow of colors.
Rainbow-colored text  at the top reads,
"Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic
People on Life and Autism.]

There are many problems with the ways in which autism is currently seen and represented in the media and public discussion. When the face of autism is still predominantly white, cisgender, heterosexual, middle or upper class boys, it erases autistic people of color, LGBTQA autistic people, and poor autistic people from the conversation and denies them vital supports and resources. It also ignores the fact that there’s an entire segment of the autistic population that spends their entire childhoods and adolescences not knowing that they’re autistic at all.

As someone who wasn’t diagnosed until I was 27, I grew up knowing that I was different but not understanding how or why for a large chunk of my life. That experience has shaped me in both positive and negative ways that are sometimes quite different from those of my counterparts who knew so much earlier. This has made me particularly interested in the perspectives of other people who have gone through similar processes. What common ground do people who were diagnosed or self-diagnosed in adulthood have? How do race, gender, sexuality, and class influence this later onset understanding of oneself? How does adult diagnosis inform our past, present and future? What can we learn from each other?

So I was thrilled when The Autistic Self Advocacy Network released its anthology Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism. The collection includes nonfiction pieces from a diverse group of autistic writers, and tackles everything from intersecting identities to passions to workplace concerns and burnout. It’s an excellent read and a valuable resource for anyone who has been through the process of being diagnosed or self-diagnosed as autistic in adulthood, anyone who wants to better understand us, and anyone who might be wondering if they might be autistic themselves.

I corresponded with the book's editor, Elizabeth Bartmess, to learn more about the anthology’s genesis, conception, and goals.

Can you tell me a little about the genesis of this anthology? What made you want to produce an anthology of work by people who have been diagnosed or self-diagnosed as adults?

In 2015, I was organizing collaborative Twitter hashtags, including #AutChat (which I'm still doing) and the #AutismMeans hashtag series. Ari Ne'eman asked if I was interested in editing this anthology for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (he was president of ASAN at the time). He proposed a nonfiction anthology, with personal narratives by adult-diagnosed/adult-self-diagnosed autistic people, aimed primarily at an autistic audience.

When autistic people come together and share their personal experiences, a particular kind of magic can happen. Often there are refrains of "I thought I was the only one!" and "I never realized that was related to being autistic." Frustrations get shared, tips get passed around, lives get better. (This isn't just an autistic thing, of course, and it doesn't always happen, but I've seen it happen often.)

We also learn about experiences that differ from our own. Autistic people vary in our autistic characteristics, in other aspects of our identities, and in our own specific life situations. Creating supportive communities requires developing a broad understanding of both our similarities and differences.

When people learn they're autistic later in life, and get accurate information about autistic experiences, they often have many closely spaced epiphanies about their lives. I found this valuable to go through myself, and fulfilling to help happen for other people. The anthology was an opportunity to do that on a broader scale.

Did you have a list of prospective authors in mind when you started to put together this anthology?

There so many good autistic writers! Some people came to mind immediately, and I learned of more people along the way. In a couple cases I asked for adaptations of existing pieces. We also put out a call for interested writers, and got a big response. The final set of contributors is about half-and-half people I approached, and people who contacted me.

As an adult-diagnosed person myself, I’m impressed and pleased at the wide variety of extremely relevant topics that are tackled in the collection. Did you have themes in mind, or did they naturally appear as a result of the material the writers were submitting?

Thank you! I asked some authors for pieces on specific topics (intersectionality, mental health, managing disability and chronic illness, sensory and social issues). Other authors suggested topics; the ones included in the anthology are burnout, accommodations at work, technology, and passions, (often called "special interests"), and intersectionality and coping skills. The overall theme—the value of knowing that you're autistic—emerged out of the individual pieces.

Some common topics have been covered in depth elsewhere, so I didn't include them in the anthology. For example, navigating the diagnostic process as an adult, job interview etiquette, handling college. There are also important underserved topics I didn't include, such as trauma recovery, acquiring needed supports, poverty, and homelessness. Those need careful and extensive coverage, and I didn't think I could do them justice. And there are topics I didn't include because I didn't have space, or didn't realize their importance at the time, or had them lined up but they fell through (aging, parenting, pregnancy, queer dating and relationships are particular topics that come to mind). Many of these topics have had some work done, but it would be great to have more.

I really love your introduction, which addresses a lot of questions that I think every autistic writer and/or public figure receives when they write anything about their own autism. It also addresses a lot of concerns that many autistic people have about their own place in discussions like these. Why was it important for you to tackle these concerns so directly off the top?

Thank you! I wanted to address common misconceptions right off because they can be particularly emotionally fraught for autistic people who weren't diagnosed in childhood, to the point that even just reading about autistic people's experiences can be stressful. I think it's helpful for non-autistic readers too, but the primary reason I wanted to address them was autistic readers.

The first misconception is that if someone wasn't diagnosed as a child, it's not important for them to know they're autistic. Autistic people are often told we don't have the experiences or needs that we do have, and we internalize that, to one degree or another. Many undiagnosed autistic adults first seek help and answers when unattended needs and the cost of masking autistic traits have pushed us into crisis, because it can take a crisis to override our internalized beliefs that we don't need or deserve support or understanding. Even people who aren't in active crisis are often struggling; it's just not true that lack of diagnosis/self-diagnosis means that we're fine.

The second misconception is that exploring whether we're autistic, thinking we're autistic, self-diagnosis, or even formal diagnosis insults and harms "real" autistic people. That's not true for a lot of reasons—health professionals often fail to diagnose people for superficial reasons, like being nonwhite or being female-presenting—but the reason I wanted to emphasize is that even if they're ultimately wrong (and they're generally not), when people explore whether they're autistic by reading about autistic people's experiences, it increases knowledge and understanding of autistic people. And when people realize they're autistic, that typically helps them personally, and also helps other autistic people generally. There's strength in numbers.

The third misconception is that autistic people are alike, so that if you don't see yourself in someone else's experience it must mean you're not really autistic. Autistic people vary a lot! That's part of what being autistic involves.

Your introduction also includes an acknowledgement of adults who are questioning whether or not they might be autistic and the anthology includes a list of resources for them, as well. Why was it important to you to reach out to this population?

I addressed some of this in my answer to the previous question, but I'll mention two additional reasons.

First, in my experience, and that of other people I've talked to, people generally start considering that the might be autistic because they are. Not always—sometimes it's some other variety of neurodivergent, like ADHD or CPTSD (both of which are common in autistic people too! Having one of those isn't equivalent to not being autistic). But they're rarely neurotypical.

Second, autistic people have built a number of strong autistic communities. People in them often have strong autistic identities, and talk about our differences from neurotypical people, and that can give outsiders the impression that if they don't have a strong autistic identity they must be neurotypical. That's not true; being autistic and having a strong autistic identity aren't the same thing. But people who are questioning whether or not they might be autistic can get the impression that it is true, and that's a barrier to self-knowledge, support, and help. (Including for people who are not autistic, but some other variety of neurodivergent.) So it's important to reach out.

Autistic people who were diagnosed or self-diagnosed in adulthood can have very different experiences—and often very different feelings about their autism—from those who were diagnosed as children. Is there anything that you hope that someone who was diagnosed in childhood might take away from reading this anthology?

When adult-diagnosed/adult-self-diagnosed people learn they're autistic, they typically have more autonomy than kids or teens do. Adults usually have more ability to influence who else gets to know that they're autistic, to refuse harmful quack "cures", and to refuse harmful therapies. (Not always, but more often.) Adults are also more likely to get diagnosed or to self-diagnose because of needs they themselves have identified.

This doesn't mean that it's better to wait for diagnosis as an adult. Often by the time we get diagnosed or self-diagnose, we've had many negative life experiences that already knowing they were autistic would have helped with. It's better to be diagnosed earlier and also not be subjected to mistreatment.

I hope what this anthology offers to autistic readers who've had bad or mixed experiences—some early-diagnosed autistic people but also some late-diagnosed/late-self-diagnosed autistic people—is a picture of what knowing you're autistic should get to look like: the benefits of self-knowledge when combined with relative autonomy and the ability to refuse consent to diagnosis-related harmful treatment. This is the world we want for all autistic people.

(A few caveats: knowing that you're autistic can do more harm than good when accompanied by misinformation about autistic people. For some people, learning that you're autistic means realizing that some things they thought they could change, they can't; that's rough, and grieving over it is normal. And sometimes the diagnosis can result in having autonomy or opportunities removed, even for adults.)

I think the anthology can also offer the same thing that learning about other autistic people's experiences can offer any autistic person, regardless of age at diagnosis/self-diagnosis: the chance to compare someone else's experiences to your own, think about might-have-beens, and potentially come up with ideas that could help you now, or that could help people who were in a position that you used to be in and that you could potentially help work toward, if that's something that's rewarding for you.

What about potential non-autistic readers? Is there anything you hope that they’ll take away from these essays?

That being autistic affects so many different aspects of our lives. That our experiences and challenges are not necessarily reflected in what we may look like to casual observers. That our identities are complex, and not just about being autistic. That we can be incredibly resourceful (even if we shouldn't be tasked with as much as we are).

Some non-autistic readers understand some or all of this already, particularly people who share significant similarities with autistic people due to other neurodivergence or disability, but also some neurotypical readers. They may be able to pick up some useful tips or ideas from the anthology, since coping skills that help autistic people can help other people, too.

Is there anything else that you’d like to address or discuss in this Q and A?

I started writing an answer, which accidentally turned into an essay too long for this interview. The brief version: how can we use accumulated autistic self-knowledge—of which this anthology is a part—to help deal with the extra burden that current and ongoing geopolitical events impose on autistic and similarly disabled people? In particular, how can autistic communities support autistic and similarly disabled people who are already maxed out and have no time or energy to devote to helping anyone else?

The anthology closes with a piece by A.C. Buchanan encouraging us to think and discuss our relationship to technology, not just as individuals but as communities. I think we can better use technology to expand the reach of our community-developed self-knowledge—in particular to help more autistic people identify themselves as autistic, to create additional supportive connections between autistic people, to create additional autistic spaces and make existing autistic spaces more inclusive, and to make more non-autistic spaces more accessible (including activist spaces).

There are already people who work on all of these and have worked on them for a long time, and made progress. I think we can channel more community effort into supporting those efforts and into creating new ones, and that using technology in new or different ways will be part of that.

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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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The New Sesame Street Julia Doll: An Autistic Review

Kris Guin
queerability.tumblr.com

Update August 6, 2019: The author no longer supports Sesame Street's "See Amazing" project because of their promotion of Autism Speaks. Please also note the following insights from Cal Montgomery:

If you have a Julia doll, be gentle with her. She is just now learning that Big Bird thinks the world would be a better place if she weren't in it.

It is an ugly shock whenever you find out the people you love feel that way. And a lot of people love Big Bird.

— Cal Montgomery (@Cal__Montgomery) August 6, 2019

The new Julia toy! Photo courtesy Kris Guin
[image: Stuffed "Julia" doll with orange hair, green eyes, yellow skin,
big happy mouth, pink dress, green pants, and black shoes.]

Sesame Street is a staple in children's television, and has used its platform to educate children about topics that need to be talked about and that children all over experience from racism to incarcerated parents to people with HIV and has shown support the LGBT community. Sesame Street has also included topics about people with disabilities from featuring a child with Downs Syndrome and a child who uses a wheelchair, and, now, Sesame Street has a character on the autism spectrum named Julia.

Sesame Street’s introduction of Julia has given visibility and dignity to autistic people of all ages. She is regularly shown as being accepted by her friends, and it is clear that her being autistic is not something to look down upon, but something to celebrate.

A part of Sesame Street’s promotion of autism acceptance is a line of Julia dolls. As an autistic person who grew up watching Sesame Street, I am thrilled to have the privilege to review a toy of an autistic character, and I am thankful to Hasbro for providing me with a toy of my own.

The doll looks just like the character from the television show. She has the same orange hair, green eyes, yellow skin, big and happy mouth, pink dress, green pants, and black shoes. The doll is made of polyester and filled with polyester fibers and stiffener. The mouth is kept wide open with plastic inserts. She has mobile ears, legs, arms, and neck.

Autistic people participate in something called “stimming.” Stimming can involve rocking back and forth, flapping hands, or fidgeting with something in our hands among other things and is a response to our sensory environment and way to communicate. As such, it is important that the toys we provide for autistic children are sensory-inclusive. The type of polyester used for Julia’s hair on this doll was pleasing for me to play with, but the type of polyester used on the rest of the doll was uncomfortable, especially for the dress which is loose on the doll and something that autistic children might want to stim with. As pleasing as the fabric on the hair was, I was disappointed to find that the hair was not stringy. Some autistic people like to stim with stringy things, and it would have been a good element to the doll if the hair was soft and stringy.

I also found it perplexing to have the mouth fixed wide open with plastic inserts because it might confuse some autistic children about why they can’t close Julia’s mouth. It would also be a good idea to have Julia’s nose be a fuzzy ball instead of being flat to give autistic children another part of Julia to stim with.

Overall, I’m very pleased that Sesame Street is not only including an autistic character but is also making toys that children who are autistic and not autistic can play with. This will help autistic children learn that they are celebrated, and it will help children who are not autistic learn to include autistic people as our friends.

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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!

----

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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