Discussing Clodfobble's book

[glatt]

I finished the book the night before last.

It's a story of your experiences, so it doesn't follow the story arc of a typical fictional novel. Normally a story builds some sort of tension or suspense, there's a bit of an exciting climactic bit, and then the tidy ending where all is brought together and summed up. Your book can't follow that pattern.

Even so, I found myself getting drawn in at the beginning of the book. What's this mysterious behavior? How are you going to deal with it? What treatments will you try? It was like I didn't already know your story. Your writing style is really engaging and drew me right in. Things got really bad, then they got better, then they got bad again. Rinse and repeat. I was getting tired of it all right along with you.

Naturally, when you got exposed to all this stuff and learned as much as you did, you started forming opinions about it all. It was interesting to hear those opinions and impressions. I'd gotten glimpses of them here in threads over the years, but it was nice to see them expounded on a bit more.

Splitting Minifobette's story off into the later chapters instead of keeping it all strictly chronological worked. It took a little more effort to keep the timeline straight in my head for her, but I think worked better than if it was strictly chronological.

I though the discussion about the two different mom roles you played was an interesting one. Minifob's mom vs Minifobette's mom and how they behaved differently.

And the ending, where you talk about book endings and try to figure out how to gracefully end this book.

I thought you did a very good job with the book. You write well, and kept me engaged.

My wife had asked me what I was readign when I started the book, and as you described some of the classrooms you had encountered, I asked her about them. In her job as a school based substitute teacher, she often winds up in the MIPA (autism) classroom for a big chunk of the day while teachers have meetings. A lot of the classroom stuff was very familiar to her.

Last night, I told her I was done with the book, and I thought there would be parts of it that she would find interesting. She was reading a magazine, and laid it down on her chest, still open to the page she was reading, and started thumbing through your book. Twenty minutes later, I look back over and see she was in the middle of the 2nd chapter and the magazine was still lying open to the article she had been reading. She's hooked.

Good book! Now I feel like skimming through the thread again.

[xoxoxoBruce]

It's a hooker, for sure. Sometimes it get deep, but never plodding. I was hoping it would show clodfobble naked, and it sure did...to the bone. Honest introspection and the turmoil of self against the world.

The split of the kid's mothers was genius, making the push-pull clear to the reader.

Yes, there's no happily ever after ending, but it left me convinced everyone in the family is going to be OK.

One of my imaginary friends in Canada worked for years in the administration of their version of child protective services. Now retired, she's working with an ad hoc group to stop the government from cutting off services to Autistic children over five. She's anxious to read this story after I mentioned it, so I sent her a copy. Hopefully it will give her more insight.