Saturday, March 14, 2009

Marcelo In The Real World

Marcelo In The Real World by Francisco Stork
Marcelo Sandoval, a seventeen-year-old boy on the high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum, faces new challenges, including romance and injustice, when he goes to work for his father in the mailroom of a corporate law firm.
"...Every time you decide, there is loss, no matter how you decide. It's always a question of what you cannot afford to lose. I'm not the one playing the piano here. You're the one that needs to decide what the next note will be...But how do I know the next note is the right one?...The right note sounds right and the wrong note sounds wrong..."/page 168

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Marcelo's inspiring, brave journey into the real world will likely engender a fierce protective instinct in readers, ratcheting up the tension as the plot winds to its sweet, satisfying denouement. It is the rare novel that reaffirms a belief in goodness; rarer still is one that does so this emphatically.

Anonymous said...

Writing in a first-person narrative, Stork does an amazing job of entering Marcelo’s consciousness and presenting him as a dynamic, sympathetic, and wholly believable character. At a little over 300 pages, the story drags at some points, bogging down in the middle. However, the dilemmas that Marcelo faces are told in a compelling fashion, which helps to keep readers engaged.