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Summary
Summary
Imagine Curious Incident of the Dog . . . with a romance, and you have the beginnings of this story of a young man struggling with the world outside his head--and the woman who gets inside it.The term "cognitive disorder" implies there is something wrong with the way I think or the way I perceive reality. I perceive reality just fine. Sometimes I perceive more of reality than others.Marcelo Sandoval hears music that nobody else can hear - part of an autism-like condition that no doctor has been able to identify. But his father has never fully believed in the music or Marcelo's differences, and he challenges Marcelo to work in the mailroom of his law firm for the summer . . . to join "the real world."There Marcelo meets Jasmine, his beautiful and surprising coworker, and Wendell, the son of another partner in the firm. He learns about competition and jealousy, anger and desire. But it's a picture he finds in a file a picture of a girl with half a face that truly connects him with the real world: its suffering, its injustice, and what he can do to fight.
Author Notes
Francisco X. Stork is the author of Marcelo in the Real World , winner of the Schneider Family Book Award for Teens and the Once Upon a World Award; The Last Summer of the Death Warriors , which was named to the YALSA Best Fiction for Teens list and won the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award; Irises ; The Memory of Light , which received four starred reviews; and Disappeared , which also received four starred reviews and was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year. He lives near Boston with his wife. You can find him on the web at franciscostork.com and @StorkFrancisco.
Reviews (3)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 8 Up-Like Christopher Boone, the protagonist in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Doubleday, 2003), Marcelo Sandoval is a high-functioning, extremely self-aware teenager with Asperger's syndrome. He has an empathetic mother and a father, Arturo, who appears to be less empathetic as he pushes Marcelo to live in the "real world." The form the real world takes is a summer job in the mailroom at Arturo's law office. The teen is forced to think on his feet, multitask, and deal with duplicitous people who try to take advantage of him. Over the course of a summer, Marcelo learns that he can function in society; he is especially surprised to find that he can learn to read people's expressions, even to the point of knowing whom he can and cannot trust. Writing in a first-person narrative, Stork does an amazing job of entering Marcelo's consciousness and presenting him as a dynamic, sympathetic, and wholly believable character. At a little over 300 pages, the story drags at some points, bogging down in the middle. However, the dilemmas that Marcelo faces are told in a compelling fashion, which helps to keep readers engaged.-Wendy Smith-D'Arezzo, Loyola College, Baltimore, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Artfully crafted characters form the heart of Stork's (The Way of the Jaguar) judicious novel. Marcelo Sandoval, a 17-year-old with an Asperger's-like condition, has arranged a job caring for ponies at his special school's therapeutic-riding stables. But he is forced to exit his comfort zone when his high-powered father steers Marcelo to work in his law firm's mailroom (in return, Marcelo can decide whether to stay in special ed, as he prefers, or be mainstreamed for his senior year). Narrating with characteristically flat inflections and frequently forgetting to use the first person, Marcelo manifests his anomalies: he harbors an obsession with religion (he regularly meets with a plainspoken female rabbi, though he's not Jewish); hears "internal" music; and sleeps in a tree house. Readers enter his private world as he navigates the unfamiliar realm of menial tasks and office politics with the ingenuity of a child, his voice never straying from authenticity even as the summer strips away some of his differences. Stork introduces ethical dilemmas, the possibility of love, and other "real world" conflicts, all the while preserving the integrity of his characterizations and intensifying the novel's psychological and emotional stakes. Not to be missed. Ages 14-up. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Library Journal Review
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time meets John Grisham-on page and screen. Seventeen-year-old Marcelo experiences the world differently from most people. His father, a high-powered lawyer, makes a deal with him. Marcelo can finish his senior year in a school for children with cognitive disorders if he will work a summer in the "real world" of his legal firm. There, Marcelo finds a picture of a girl with half a face that compels him to look more closely at a liability litigation involving the firm's biggest client. Why It Is for Us: Marcelo's first-person narrative affords unique insight into the fascinating thought patterns of a likable character who's not quite like us. For Marcelo, crossing the street takes concentrated effort, but religious philosophy and music interpretation come as natural as breathing. The legal drama is a vehicle for larger questions of friendship, loyalty, and trust. As most readers know, navigating the complexities of the real world is not for the weak of heart.-Angelina Benedetti, King Cty. Lib. Syst., WA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.