Published on 12, July, 2020
I'm looking for book recommendations of books that have autistic characters, reading level of young adult and up. Not ones where you could argue that the character is autistic, but where the character is definitely written to be autistic.
I finished reading the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and I really enjoyed it. I felt I could really identify with how the character thinks and acts at time. I also think it helped me learn a bit more about how others experience autism. I would love to read more like it.
I work in a secondary school library and recommend The State of Grace by Rachael Lucas - it was reading this as part of my job that first made me realise that I too was autistic. Three years on and I now have a diagnosis of ASD. The main character is a teenage girl with Asperger’s, and so many things rang true with me I was in a stunned state for a long time afterwards. My other teen / YA recommendations are Notes on My Family by Emily Critchley and A Kind of Spark by Elle McNicol. A Different Sort of Normal by Abigail Balfe is more of a cartoon style biography of the author as an then-undiagnosed child / young adult and is fantastically relatable.