Hot off the presses — this review of Cynthia Lord’s Rules is so fresh, it’s still steaming. Stephanie Ford just posted it yesterday at her blog. Rules deals with one of the more sensitive topics of our day — autism — from the perspective of the older sister.
Ford’s a panelist for Middle Grade Fiction, and you can see from this excerpt how sensitive she is to this tetchy age group:
As much as I enjoyed reading about Catherine’s relationship with her
brother and her friends, it was her relationship with her parents that
really got to me. Most preteens will be able to really relate to
Catherine’s intense need for her parents attention when her parents are
focused on other important things. Catherine could have easily come off
as mean or selfish during certain points of the book, but Cynthia Lord
does a wonderful job letting the reader understand her actions in order
to balance things out, and I really appreciated that Catherine was a
realistic kid, not a saint.
Read the rest here.