By Libby Scott, Rebecca Westcott
An autistic girl exhausted from pretending to be 'normal' at a new school, co-written by an autistic girl her own age.
Tally is eleven and autistic, and she's about to start secondary school determined to act like everyone else, to mask so hard nobody notices she's different. But hiding who you are all day is exhausting, and it costs her: a friendship curdles, the whispers start, and the effort of pretending builds toward a breaking point. The story runs as regular chapters braided with Tally's own diary entries about what being autistic actually feels like.
One of the two authors, Libby Scott, is an autistic girl who was about Tally's age when she wrote the diary sections, so the voice is the real thing, not an adult's guess. For an autistic child, especially one who masks all day and comes home wrung out, this is the mirror: someone finally naming the exhaustion of pretending. For a neurotypical child, it's the clearest window on the shelf into why a classmate might act the way they do.