I have been trying to write this review for over a week. Man, this longer format is hard to adapt to. I’d only been reviewing books for the shop, and I need to write them more handsell type of reviews – what you would say when you hand someone the book as a purchase suggestion. But now that I’ve branched out into this blog, I need the reviews to be longer than a few sentences. Sometimes it’s really easy to describe a book, and sometimes I really struggle with it. This is a long-winded way of saying that this review might not be very good, which should not keep you from reading the book, which is.

Marcelo is autistic – possibly he has a form of Asperger’s Syndrome, but no doctor has ever been able to pinpoint exactly what it is. He hears music in his head (he calls it IM, for internal music), talks about himself in the third person, and is obsessed with religion. For most of his life he has attended a private school for people with similar issues to his, and now his father wants him to go to public high school for his senior year in preparation for entering the “real world” after graduation. Marcelo is incredibly resistant to this idea, so his father makes him a deal: come work at his law firm for the summer and get a taste of the real world, and at the end of the summer Marcelo can make his own decision about where he will spend senior year.

The two main characters in Marcelo’s life at the law firm (in addition to his father, of course) are Jasmine, the head of the mail room where he works (who is resentful that he got the job at all), and Wendell, the overly privileged (and, it must be said, jackass) son of his father’s partner. Jasmine becomes the closest thing to a best friend Marcelo has ever had, while Wendell becomes the closest thing to an adversary – but it is only the discovery of a picture of a disfigured girl, which leads Marcelo to uncover information he never wanted to know, that truly sends him down a life changing path.

This book is going to garner a lot of comparison with THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME simply because the main characters in both books fall somewhere along the autism spectrum. True, the voice is a little similar, but I don’t think the books are very much alike at all. The major difference is that I feel like MARCELO reads much older than NIGHT-TIME. While I was reading MARCELO, I kept wondering how it had ended up at a kids’ publisher (Scholastic).

Don’t get me wrong – I think there are some older kids out there who will really enjoy this. But to me it read like an adult book that some teens will like rather than a book written for teens. And as Scholastic is kid/YA only, there’s not any opportunity for cross-promotion with their adult side.

The real hope for this book to get the recognition I think it deserves is for it to win some sort of award, which I certainly think it’s good enough to do.

Publisher: Scholastic

Pub Date: March 1, 2009