Rules

This was my beach book yesterday, which is probably my favorite thing about summer: the vast number of places I can go to read. No longer am I confined to my bed, couch, office, classroom, or Starbucks. Now I can take a book to the dog park, to the beach, to the pond, to the porch, to the barbecue (assumptions about being anti-social be damned), and myriad other places, in addition to the places I already take my books to. Oh, summer vacation. Three days in and I'm already in love with you.

Anyway, the book -Rules, by Cynthia Lord. I loved it. The book is about Catherine, a twelve year old girl whose summer vacation has just started. Unfortunately, it's not looking good. Her best friend, Melissa, is away for the summer, so she's left with nothing to do but baby-sit her autistic brother. There is an upside: a new girl her age is moving in next door.  However, in typical pre-teen fashion, nothing seems to work out as she expected. Her new friend for the summer instead ends up being Jason, whom she meets in the waiting room of the clinic her brother goes to for OT. Jason has some unspecified disability which leaves him using a wheelchair to get around and a communication book as a means of talking. Through her friendship with Jason, Catherine learns a lot about herself and what it means to be the sister of somebody with Autism.

What really clinched the book for me, though, was how perfectly the author managed to capture what it's like to be a pre-teen girl. Flashlight communication with your new-best-friend next door? Nobody actually does that, but everybody dreams of it. The fear of what other people think of you comes up again and again -after all, Catherine is dealing with a brother who is incapable of understanding how his actions will be perceived by others. She knows how people look at him, but is helpless to stop him from doing weird things (like quoting from "Frog and Toad" when he can't find the right thing to say), which leaves her all the more self-conscious. And now she's made friends with somebody who needs a wheelchair and a communication book to be functional, which only adds to her general outsider-ness (not a word, but since this is a piece of more or less creative writing, I'm allowing word play).

Catherine herself is the perfect heroine: she gets angry and frustrated, but she is, to her core, a strong person and a wonderful role model. She sees Jason for who he really is, instead of being scared of his wheelchair and communication book. She understands that her brother is still her brother -even if he is weird to other people, they still have a special bond that is important to her. And finally, she understands that if other people like her less because she is more inclusive than they are, then they aren't really her friends. For a twelve-year-old to understand this (albeit, a fictional one) is remarkable. She is the kind of student I would dream of having in my classroom.

I stole this book out of my school's guided reading library, so I very much intend to use this for guided reading. As I read this book, I thought about the new CCSS, which strongly emphasize close reading. This book is rich with complex ideas and thematic passages that beg to be dug into, so I can see myself using this book for that purpose in a small group. However, I can also see myself using this book whole-class to dig into some major issues around inclusion. How do we include those who are different, and how do we know when we are being discriminatory? How do we deal with a sibling who is different, and therefore makes us seem different? I don't even know if these are the questions I would use, because they seem somehow discriminatory, but digging into that kind of thinking could be important, especially in inclusive classrooms. So much about this book makes me excited to read it with kids.