These six books are for your other child. Not the one with the diagnosis — the one standing next to them. Nearly everything written about disability is for the disabled child or about them, and it leaves your typically-developing child holding a feeling nobody has given them permission to have: that they are embarrassed, and tired, and sometimes furious, and that being any of those things makes them a bad person. Every one of these books says out loud that they are not. Julie wishes her autistic brother had stayed home. Catherine writes rules to stop hers looking odd in the parking lot. Rachel loves her sister and cannot bear the boys on the bus saying her name. Moose would fight Al Capone for his sister and resents every hour she has cost him. Nobody in these books gets told off for any of it. Reach for whichever fits the child in front of you. My Brother Charlie is a good place to start, and it was written by a real girl about her real twin.
Here is the thing these six books have in common, and it is not disability. It is a feeling. Somewhere in each of them a child says a version of the same sentence: I love them and I wish they were different, and I am ashamed of myself for wishing it. Ian's Walk is the sharpest about it. Julie is embarrassed to be seen with her autistic little brother, she says so, and no grown-up appears to correct her — and then she loses him at the park and the fear rips the embarrassment out of her by the roots. My Sister, Alicia May does something rarer: Rachel adores Alicia and is mortified by her on the same page, and the book refuses to resolve that into one clean feeling. Rules lets Catherine be unkind, to her brother and to a boy who cannot chase her down and argue, and makes her walk it back herself. Al Capone Does My Shirts hands a boy a sister with autism thirty years before the word existed, and lets him be furious about a childhood spent second. Three of these were written by people who lived it in their own houses. Ryan Elizabeth Peete co-wrote My Brother Charlie with her mother when she was about twelve, about her own twin brother RJ, which makes it the only book here written by a sibling who was still one. Gennifer Choldenko's older sister Gina had autism and died at eighteen, and Al Capone Does My Shirts is dedicated to her. Cynthia Lord wrote Rules as the mother of an autistic son, after her daughter asked her why she never saw families like theirs in books. That is where the honesty comes from, and it is why none of these books asks your child to be grateful for what having this sibling has taught them. Reach for the one that matches the child.