Mockingbird

Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine

Philomel Books - April 15, 2010
224 pages

I'm not going to try to attempt to make this a good synopsis, so I'll just copy from what the inside cover tells you. I repeat, this is what they actually marketed to people.

In Caitlin's world, everything is black and white. Anything in between is confusing. That's the stuff her brother, Devon, always explained. But now Devon is dead, and her father cries a lot. She wants to help her dad--and herself!--but as a ten-year-old girl with Asperger's syndrome, she doesn't know how.
     She turns to textbooks and dictionaries, easy for Caitlin because they're full of facts in black and white. After reading the definition of Closure, Caitlin knows this is just what she and her father need. And she is determined to find it. In her search, she discovers that not everything is really black and white--the world is full of colors, messy and beautiful. Caitlin and her father can have Closure and Empathy, too.
     A warm and loving book that gives young readers a rare glimpse of a very special world and a brave and very special girl.

The synopsis should have been enough to deter you from the start. If you can tell by the cover, this book actually won an award. Several comments have been raised, and I'll bring to light two of them. First, the book is attempting too much at once. This is beyond true; it's trying to be how a community deals with a school shooting, how a girl copes with Asperger's, and how a family copes with loss of a family member all at once. Now, this would have been perfectly fine if it weren't for the fact that for the first one hundred and fifty pages or so, Caitlin does nothing important. She spends all of her time refusing to talk to people, crying about her dead brother, and crawling in a "hidey-hole" that her dead brother made for her. Also, the book's language appears cutesy and inauthentic. The author tries to make the voice sound like a child, but talks down to them instead. In addition, the narrator claims to have an adult reading level at age ten and is the best artist in the state of Virginia; nobody can compete with this, and youth especially are going to be deterred from how far above the protagonist is. One especially annoying thing I found about this was the fact that the language characters used were not in quotation marks, but rather in italics. Another irritating thing about the writing was the fact that words Caitlin was interested in were capitalized (Heart, Closure, and Empathy I remember right off the bat). All in all, there is little good in this book.

Grade: F