NonVerbal by Molly Zenk
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was an amazing read from start to finish. I couldn’t put it down, and had to know if things would get better for Emerson. Emerson Rayne is a middle school girl who is Autistic and mostly non-verbal. She can speak sometimes, usually short one or two word answers, and very infrequently. When she was a toddler, she could speak perfectly fine, until she was around fifteen months old, and then her words left her. Emerson wants to be like the neurotypical girls she sees sometimes at school, but the sensory overload that comes from being in a school with bright lights, loud noises and mean kids, sometimes makes Emerson’s days more difficult. Emerson wants to be a good girl, but sometimes she finds it too difficult to fight the urges to run away, to eat things she shouldn’t, and possibly worst of all the feeling of bugs crawling on her that she knows is not on the outside, as well as the feeling of fire that is also not on the outside but leads her to harming herself in an effort to make the pain stop. Sometimes her attempts to get the feelings to go away cause her to hurt those around her, like her best friend Ryleigh or even her teachers. As her behavior problems at school continue to escalate, her parents try everything they know how to try and so does the school, until the finally are forced to put her back into what she calls the hospital school, an inpatient treatment for children experiencing behavior crisis. Between a new treatment plan, and a new school targeted at helping ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) kids, Emerson and her family hope things will get better. As a part of two ASD kids, as well as a SpEd parapro for a middle school child, I found this book to be very authentic and helpful. I quickly got attached to Emerson, while also being able to empathize with her parents as well as with her teachers/parapros. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know a little more about what it’s like to be in any of these positions.

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