Review: I felt like the author missed several points
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 07 1, 2014
People (including me) love hurt/comfort books because they evoke emotional responses.  This one didn't really do much for me for several reasons.One, the author did a lot of research on raising children with autism, but the story lacked realism.  The information was there, but the situation didn't feel authentic to me.  The father made several comments that I couldn't picture hearing from a parent of a child with autism (not about resentment, that is normal, but things like calling his child a "high functioning autistic."). The child was kind of a textbook case and there was a lot of discussion of children with autism not having empathy.Second, she didn't appear to have done a lot of research on literacy, but simply piled hardships on this gorgeous guy to make him as pathetic as possible.But the final straw for me was that poor Mattie didn't get the opportunity to grow at all.  His dreams apparently weren't allowed to change.  I found the whole idea that you get one dream in life, and that that dream would be a place, really bizarre.  Of all of the reasons people might split up, it seemed silly.  We change our goals constantly as our lives change, why couldn't he change his?  I would have felt the story more if Mattie had been the one to decide to go, but having other people make his choices for him made me annoyed, not sympathetic.It read as really contrived, like the author came up with this postcard idea and then forced this whole plot to happen.  The characters felt overdone.  It was like  every possible hurt/comfort trope got crammed into one novel and instead of making it extra emotional, it made it unrealistic.The writing style isn't bad.  I just think there was too much.  And it felt forced.