By Cynthia Lord
A twelve-year-old keeps a list of rules for her autistic little brother, and this is the summer she has to admit some of the rules are really for her.
Catherine is twelve. Her brother David is eight and autistic, and she keeps a running list of rules for him: no toys in the fish tank, chew with your mouth closed, keep your pants on in public. She'll tell you the rules are to help David. Read a little further and you notice some of them exist so nobody stares at the two of them in the parking lot. Then a girl her own age moves in next door, and Catherine wants her as a friend so badly that she starts hiding David to get it. Every week she also sits in the waiting room at David's clinic, and that's where she meets Jason, who is fourteen, uses a wheelchair, doesn't speak, and talks by pointing at small word cards kept in a binder. Catherine starts drawing him better ones. When Jason asks her to a dance at the community center, she says no, and the reason she gives him is a lie, and he knows it's a lie. The book doesn't look away from that.
It's honest about a twelve-year-old's meanness in a way almost nothing written for this age will risk. Catherine loves David. She's also embarrassed by him, jealous of how much room he takes up at home, and aching for one friend who has never met him. And she does something cruel to a boy who can't chase her down to argue about it. The book never swoops in to excuse her. It lets her sit in what she did, lets Jason be furious, and makes Catherine be the one to walk it back. For a child who has ever wished a brother or sister were different and then felt sick about the wishing, Catherine may be the first character who says that wish out loud. There's real joy in the word cards, too. Watching Catherine hand a boy the words to be funny, impatient, and rude is the best thing in the book.