But, I find Marcelo captivating for much more than just the ways I can personally identify with him.
As an introverted, animal lover who studied religion for my B.A., it’s not difficult to see why Marcelo would appeal to me. At school he helps to train the therapy ponies, and at home he is always accompanied by his dog Namu.
He also develops very close relationships with animals. He has an incredibly rich inner life filled with the “internal music” he hears, and he thinks deeply about all things religious as religion is his special interest. He lives in a tree house behind his family’s home. How often are we given a book that provides our students any insight into what it might be like to experience the world with autism or Asperger’s syndrome? This alone makes it a significant book. He says of himself, “.the closest description of my condition is Asperger’s syndrome.” (p. Marcelo is a seventeen year old on the autism spectrum. He is very different from many of the main characters in other books we’ve read here at Vamos a Leer. Marcelo has become one of my favorite protagonists. Reminiscent of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” in the intensity and purity of its voice, this extraordinary novel is a love story, a legal drama, and a celebration of the music each of us hears inside. But it’s a picture he finds in a file - a picture of a girl with half a face - that truly connects him with the real world: its suffering, its injustice, and what he can do to fight. He learns about competition and jealousy, anger and desire.
But the summer after his junior year, his father demands that Marcelo work in his law firm’s mailroom in order to experience “the real world.” There Marcelo meets Jasmine, his beautiful and surprising coworker, and Wendell, the son of another partner in the firm. Marcelo Sandoval hears music no one else can hear–part of the autism-like impairment no doctor has been able to identify–and he’s always attended a special school where his differences have been protected.
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