I LOVED this book!
For some reason I have no desire to read books with autistic characters. I think it may be because autistic people are hard to relate to. They are hard to bond with. I want to care about the characters in the books I read, and autistic characters are hard to care about, because they don’t feel things the way other people do. They don’t share my emotions so how can they pull at my emotions?
I’m not sure that Edison Thomas is autistic—he never tells us. But his condition falls in the autism spectrum, I think. Maybe he has Asperger’s Syndrome. I don’t know, I’m not that well-versed in these kinds of disabilities.
But here’s the surprising thing: I loved this book. I loved Edison Thomas. I wanted him to succeed. I loved his voice, and I did relate to him even though he didn’t relate easily to others. How did the author do this? How did she make me care about the strange little kid who can’t read people’s facial expressions and who can’t really get jokes? He’s kind of like Star Trek’s Data…unable to grasp what others are feeling, because he’s never felt the way they feel.
Edison Thomas has a lot going for him, though. He’s without guile, for one thing. It makes sense if you think about it. What makes us hypocritical? We care about what others think of us. But if you are not even aware of what others are thinking, you have no reason to pretend to be something you aren’t. You aren’t impressed by others and you have no need to impress others. There’s something refreshing and endearing about such a character.
Edison Thomas is also self-aware. He understands that he’s different and he doesn’t really care that he’s different. He finds it interesting, perhaps, but not really bothersome. He approaches his differences the same way he approaches all of life. He examines them dispassionately. He even has a little bit of a sense of humor about his differences.
He has a father who loves him and refuses to spoil him. His father sees his weakness as something that needs to be worked on but also as a flip side to his strengths—if Edison Thomas weren’t dispassionate, he would not be the great inventor that he is. So his father sees him as wired differently and he sees that different wiring as something that can be used for good. At the same time he insists that Edison should keep on learning to read people and keep on working on getting along in society.
By giving us a loving father, the author gave us a boy who is worthy of love. Then she put this lovable character into a story we can all relate to. There’s a bully, a science project, and a competition. Edison’s conflict grabbed me from the first page and did not let me go until the last. I wanted him to beat the bully. I wanted him to win the science fair. I wanted him to find friends who would accept him and love him as he was—who would appreciate his unique gifts. And I wanted him to love the right friends.
Some of the things I wanted, I got. Others, I didn’t. I won’t tell you about how the book ends, but I closed it completely satisfied, and I immediately put Jacqueline Houtman on my list of authors to love. I’m going to buy her next book. For sure. I’m hoping, with her love of science, she will be putting out more middle grade boy books. I think she’s got an under-served audience to tap into.
The Reinvention of Edison Thomas is not only entertaining, it says so much about the human condition, the way we view others, the reasons we feel insecure, the need we have for love. It says a lot about where we derive our self-worth, and how well we accept ourselves and whether we should attempt to hide our differences and fit in, or whether we should celebrate our differences. And it does all this by telling an interesting story about a little boy and a science fair.
I’m surprised to say this, because I had this book on my shelf for months before I read it—this really isn’t my genre—but this one will go in my top ten list of best buys for Christmas this year. It’s good for boys or girls. It’s a quiet book, and yet the conflict grabbed me and held me, and the young protagonist, who doesn’t feel love the same way I do, made me love him from the start.
