I’m going to take a chance here and review a book that will not be acceptable to a fair number of you. I appreciate that, and I understand. My recommendation is conditional.
To get the objections out of the way, I’ll say that Edward Adrift by Craig Lancaster contains a lot of profanity. This is because the main character is a high functioning man with Asperger’s Syndrome. He uses foul language because he repeats what he hears, and doesn’t really understand why some words are OK and some aren’t. A major character in the story tries to get him to stop, and he doesn’t resent it.
Also the approach to sex was uncomfortable for me. Not because there’s explicit sex, but because a scene that involves only a kiss and some petting is portrayed so intimately that I (personally) found it hard to read. But that may be because I score fairly high on the Asperger’s scale myself (though I don’t qualify for the diagnosis), and I identified more than most people would. The attitudes toward sex generally, in this book, are very contemporary and have little if anything to do with biblical morality.
OK, having warned you of these things I’ll go on to say that I found Edward Adrift engrossing and moving.
2011 has not been a good year for Edward Stanton. First of all, his best friends, a family across the street, moved away from his neighborhood in Billings, Montana to Butte. Then the counselor who’d helped him better relate to the world retired and turned him over to another doctor, whom he doesn’t yet trust. Then he was fired from his custodial job at the newspaper. One of the Dragnet videotapes he always watched at 10:00 every night broke, so of course he had to throw the whole set out. Getting diagnosed with diabetes was almost good news for him, because it gave him a reason to start keeping a new list. He loves lists.
But when he gets a call from Donna, one of the neighbors who moved away, that her son Kyle, his best buddy, is becoming uncontrollable and failing at school, Edward makes the (for him) heroic choice to drive his car to Butte and see if he can help. This movement outside his comfort zone sets him up for an adventure in which he’ll do things he’d never imagined.
I thought some elements of this story, especially its resolution, were a little beyond credibility. But I nevertheless read it with fascination and was moved by it.
Just be warned about the language and stuff.
My understanding of Asberger’s doesn’t include the practice of repeating words. What I’ve read of it speaks of highly intelligent people with one or two fields of focused intense interest and lack of social graces since they tend to be oblivious of non-verbal cues. Another word for it is Geek-ism. I wonder if this author has applied the title of Asperger’s to another stop on the autism spectrum, or if my reading on the subject has been too limited.
You might like to read 600 Hour of Edward, which is the first story of Edward. It will explain much of his character.