Mockingbird
By Kathryn Erskine
Puffin Books, 2010
Mockingbird is a children's/young adult novel about a young girl with Asperger's syndrome whose brother is killed in a school shooting. No, it's not one of those angsty books for teenagers -- it's a fairly positive book, written for kids and around 9-14, and is rather well-written. It also won the 2010 National Book Award for Young People's Literature.
Caitlin has a hard enough time with life -- she has some severe sensory integration issues, she doesn't 'get' people or emotions, and people don't 'get' her. When her brother is killed things get worse -- not just because she misses her brother, although she certainly does, but because everyone around her is falling apart, making the understanding gap between her and her family and schoolmates nearly insurmountable.
Amongst this chaos, two solutions are presented: her school counselor believes that things will get better if she can make some friends, and the media tells her that she needs to get some closure. So she sets out to get these things.
The friend turns out to be easier than she could have expected -- there's a first grader at her school who turns out to be pretty cool, and he's certainly nicer than the other fifth-graders. Against all reason, this does not satisfy the school counselor, but it's nice to have a friend anyway. Closure turns out to be a bit harder -- no one knows how to get it. Caitlin finds herself in the position of having to bully her father out of his funk, and into finding a way to deal with his grief.
Despite the subject matter, this is an uplifting story -- certainly not a happy one, all things considered, but not a sad one. It is also fairly popular right now, being a well-written addition to the current trend in children's lit of spotlighting special needs children. For the most part, its popularity is deserved. It is well written, with interesting characters, including a relatable main character, and a fairly good treatment of a community dealing with tragedy.
It is likewise a fairly good treatment of Asperger's syndrome, although almost out of necessity Caitlin is a bit stereotypical. After all, part of the purpose of this book undoubtedly to help kids understand some of the most common behaviors and symptoms correlated with Asperger's, so those aspects had better be apparent. It is worth noting that the book is in the first person, balancing recent books showing the AU spectrum from the outside, such as Al Capone Does my Shirts and Rules.
All things considered, it would be hard to write a much better book for fifth graders that deals with school shootings and Asperger's. It is also a good, and quick, read for older folks.
Accelerated reader level: 3.6.