Great Reads: Schneider Family Book Awards

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Marcelo in the Real World, written by lawyer Francisco X. Stork, is the winner of the Schneider Family Book Award in the teen category. In it, 17-year-old Marcelo Sandoval leaves his private-school comfort zone when he takes a summer job working in the mailroom of his father’s law firm. Exposed to office politics and lapses of ethics, Marcelo strives for balance between his personal code of conduct and real-world situations.  Marcelo debates whether to be loyal to his father even though he finds his father’s shady dealings offensive. Then there are the complications of a budding romance with Jasmine, his mailroom boss, and rivalry with the law partner’s son.  All of this is compounded by Marcelo having Asperger Syndrome, adding a layer of difficulty to interacting with people. 

Middle-school students should meet sixth-grader Jason Blake, the hero of Anything but Typical  by Nora Raleigh Baskin. Jason is a silent boy with autism who prefers writing on the Storyboard web site to talking with classmates. Online he becomes friends with PhoenixBird, a girl who likes his stories, but his anxiety mounts when he learns that they are both attending a Storyboard convention. Given his nerdy appearance and autism, he realistically figures that a face-to-face meeting will be disastrous. Find out more about Jason and his encounters with neurotypicals—people without autism—in this book, which won the Schneider Family Book Award in the middle school category.