A Book Review
Marcelo is looking forward to his coming summer job as caretaker of the therapy ponies at Paterson, a special school for children with disabilities which he himself has attended for years. He is an intelligent but sheltered teenager with a condition that places him on the Autism spectrum. However, Marcelo’s father, wanting him to gain experience in the “real world,” pushes him into a job in the mail room of his Boston corporate law firm. If he isn’t successful at the mailroom job and at following what his father terms “the rules of the real world,” he will be required to go to a regular high school for his senior year rather than his beloved Paterson. And so the reader is thrust with Marcelo into the competitive, confusing and relativistic world of the law firm, viewing it all through his fresh eyes.
It is absolutely riveting to follow Marcelo’s thoughts as he confronts the politics, deceptions, and evils that surround him in the law firm and begins to wrestle with what is right and wrong and how he should conduct his life. His observations and occasional misapprehensions of the words and actions of those who surround him are by turns humorous and startlingly insightful. At times the reader is almost embarrassed at Marcelo’s naivety, only to be dumbfounded seconds later by his deft and logical breakdown of a common perplexity of human behavior. The reader should not have any problem identifying with this character; his autistic-based obsessions and limitations come to seem not so different from those of anyone else in the story or in real life. His social shortcomings are countered by great perception and moral aptitude. A lot of credit should be given to the author for creating such a breathing character.
In a day when many young adult books deal with sex in an extremely casual manner, this book is refreshing and courageous for intelligently suggesting that such casual sex may actually be emotionally and spiritually destructive, and making cogent arguments for sexual morality and high ethics in general. The book is also courageous for bringing religion to bear in these moral arguments in a sophisticated and respectful way; Marcelo is extremely interested in religion and God, and both leans upon and questions his religious knowledge as he is confronted with moral quandaries at the law firm.
Filled with believable characters, realistic situations, beautiful metaphors and stunning ideas, this is a brave, masterful, coming-of-age novel that is a likely contender for the major young adult awards of the coming year.
Marcelo in the Real World
Written by Francisco X. Stork
Arthur A. Levine / Scholastic
315 pages
ISBN: 978-0-545-05474-4
Release Date: Mar 2009
franciscostork.com
Mary lives in a place simply known as the village. It is surrounded by protective fences which must constantly be patrolled and repaired to keep the village safe from the forest beyond and its threat of the Unconsecrated – shuffling, moaning, infected undead that, for all the villagers know, may have overrun the entire earth, save this last sanctuary of normal human life. All her life Mary has heard the folklore passed down through her family telling of the ocean and a world that existed beyond the village and the forest. As much as the fences keep death out, Mary begins to feel that they are keeping her in as well. Her childhood friendships have matured into a troublesome love triangle which puts her at odds with the will of the Sisterhood who control the village, and breaches soon break out everywhere, not only in the fences, but in her family life, friendships,and what she thought she knew of her village and the world outside.