Cammie McGovern, Eye Contact

With the scary increase in cases of autism, there has been an increase in books, both fiction and nonfiction, that deal with the subject. Eye Contact is fiction, but I feel it is one of the better portrayals of life with an autistic child--something I fortunately haven't experienced, however I do have a close friend who lives with it every day--as has the author. Statistics show that few marriages survive when a child is born autistic. The parenting toll is too great. There is little left for a spouse. And with no real answers as to why a child is autistic or how to best help, it is too easy to blame the other person. Unfortunately, when a marriage ends in an autistic family, the childcare burden usually falls entirely on the mother.

In Eye Contact, there never was a marriage, but this doesn't make the effort in raising her son any easier. Nine-year-old Adam is Cara's autistic son. He speaks very little and when he is possibly the only witness to a murder, he shuts down even further. Cara's efforts not only to help with the investigation but simply to bring her son back are gut wrenching. She knows he will never speak or interact as a typical child, yet she cannot bear to see the gains he's made in communication, after years of intense work, disappear. This is a mystery and terrific suspense, but more than that, it is a glimpse into a world of special needs parenting that every mother prays won't happen to her.

In a similar vein but from the viewpoint of an autistic boy himself, is the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon. Also fiction and a mystery, this book does a good job of taking the reader inside the mind of autism, why autistics react in ways that seem completely illogical to the rest of us. Indeed, it explains that the autistic mind is so logical that the rest of us very often make no sense at all.