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In a near-future America in which criminals are sentenced to mind-altering treatments and there is a pre-birth cure for autism, and yet in which everything else seems exactly the same as it is now, Lou Arrendale and his co-workers are the last autistics born before the cure. They have a tailored work environment which allows them to use their savant-like talents to do some vague work for their company, and generally function perfectly well as they are, so long as no one tries to force them to be more "normal." But someone invents a cure for people who were already born autistic, and Lou's extremely evil supervisor decided to force all the autistic workers to take it. While Lou and his friends try to decide if they want to take it or not, Lou contemplates making a move on a non-autistic woman at his fencing club, and becomes the target of an extremely evil unknown person.
I think this came out in the same year as another book with an autistic protagonist, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. The latter is much better-- more smoothly written, less predictable, funnier, more convincing, and with more sympathetic and believable characters. Moon's book gets points for ambition and readability, but would have been much better if she had skipped the contrived and melodramatic plot elements and just written a book about an autistic man who is offered a cure. The best parts of the book are the scenes where not much is happening except for Lou going about his daily life. If the whole book was about that, showing us how he sees the world, I would have liked it much better than the overplotted book I got.
As it is, it's obvious to most of the characters other than Lou that what the evil supervisor is doing is illegal, and several of them pitch in to help him out. So there's no suspense about whether or not the evil guy will get his way, and Lou himself doesn't have to take significant action. The plotline with the woman he likes doesn't go anywhere, and the one with his unknown stalker is pointless except for giving Lou something to do other than contemplate the cure. And while there are lots of evil people in real life, Moon fails to convince me that the ones in her book are there for any other reason than to draw hisses and boos.
Lou's final decision is not clearly motivated, and the epilogue seems to contradict the message in the rest of the book. I think it was meant to be deep and thought-provoking, but it's so brief and so little information is given in it that it leaves the impression that Moon herself didn't know what point she was trying to make.
I think this came out in the same year as another book with an autistic protagonist, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. The latter is much better-- more smoothly written, less predictable, funnier, more convincing, and with more sympathetic and believable characters. Moon's book gets points for ambition and readability, but would have been much better if she had skipped the contrived and melodramatic plot elements and just written a book about an autistic man who is offered a cure. The best parts of the book are the scenes where not much is happening except for Lou going about his daily life. If the whole book was about that, showing us how he sees the world, I would have liked it much better than the overplotted book I got.
As it is, it's obvious to most of the characters other than Lou that what the evil supervisor is doing is illegal, and several of them pitch in to help him out. So there's no suspense about whether or not the evil guy will get his way, and Lou himself doesn't have to take significant action. The plotline with the woman he likes doesn't go anywhere, and the one with his unknown stalker is pointless except for giving Lou something to do other than contemplate the cure. And while there are lots of evil people in real life, Moon fails to convince me that the ones in her book are there for any other reason than to draw hisses and boos.
Lou's final decision is not clearly motivated, and the epilogue seems to contradict the message in the rest of the book. I think it was meant to be deep and thought-provoking, but it's so brief and so little information is given in it that it leaves the impression that Moon herself didn't know what point she was trying to make.
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Alternatively, I'd suggest-- if you have a taste for gothic, creepy, and disturbed, but liked the narrative momentum and style of _Curious Incident_, a book called _The Ninth Life of Louis Drax_.