Autistic & Unreliable Narrators: Mockingbird

Mockingbird won the National Book Award. My reaction? Strongly negative. This is an "issues" book gone over the deep-end. Supposedly we're reading about an Asperger's elementary-school girl dealing with her brother's murder during a middle-school-shooting.  That's a lot to pack into a short book: 224 short pages with large print, including an author's note that's partially diary entry, mostly mea culpa. (The more I think about the book, the more I find fault.)

That the narrator's mother is dead barely warrants more than a mention. Autistic and Asperger's children may have trouble communicating their connections to close family, but that doesn't mean they don't value them. The young narrator is practically socipathic in her lack of emotion connected to her dead mother. Plus, geez: a murdered brother, dead mother, and "Asperger's"? Mockingbird suffers from an overload of after-school-special sentimentality.

Perhaps calling a disabled narrator unreliable is unfair, but it certainly limits readers' view of the full story. Combining that with a tough issue for readers of any age, let alone very young ones, could be very interesting. But there is no depth to the book: there's too much to explore and then the narrator's disability is much more severe than a diagnosis of Asperger's allows. She behaves much more like a moderately-functioning autistic child. I'd like to know how this discrepancy fits with the author's note that her own daughter has Asperger's. Who misunderstands whom?

Mockingbird struck me as a book that got accolades because it is daring: Asperger's and school-shootings are rarely seen in children's literature. But just being first to the scene is not enough to make something wonderful.

Agree? Disagree? Whatever your thoughts, we'd like to hear them in the comments.