YA New York

It’s hard for me to think of a book I’ve read in the last six months that was as absorbing as Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork.

The pub date is officially not until March, but Amazon’s already got it for sale, so I’m going to tell you about it now:

Marcelo Sandoval is a seventeen-year-old boy who suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome. (We talk a lot about Asperger’s these days, in a joking, offhand manner. We may say that anyone who is a bit nerdy must have Asperger’s. I myself have been party to a few of these conversations. But what we’re talking about is completely different from the more severe illness that falls within the autism spectrum.) Marcelo is highly-functioning, but while he could probably have gotten through a regular public school, he went instead to a school for children with autism. Until the summer after the end of his junior year, when his father announces that he will be attending public school in the fall and working at his father’s law firm this summer.

Of course, Marcelo doesn’t want this at all, and so we read about the struggles of working at the firm, but in the end the story is about much more than what is said. It is about coming to understand and love a character who suffers from a disorder most of us know very little about. Since Stork writes from Marcelo’s perspective, we get to think along with him, to share the way he sees the world.

Back to the story, I suppose: It’s a good one. Marcelo does face a lot of challenges in the real world, at the law firm, than he has in his thus-far protected life. He has to make decisions about what to do about a complicated moral dilemma. There is a bit at the end that is left unresolved — which left me wanting just a few pages more — but that is a personal preference and not a professional criticism. In other words, I can see quite plainly why things left off the way they did, and it works well.

Anyway, the reason I am so strongly recommending this book isn’t actually for the plot. Marcelo could be doing anything, and I’d read about it. His internal life is so fascinating, his character so complex, that he is completely real to me. It is as if Stork magically called a flesh and blood human being to my side.

Okay, so there’s no star system here, but if there were, I’d give this five hundred thousand. Go. Read. Come back, discuss.