Alex's+Book+Rationale

//Marcelo in the Real World // recounts the experiences of Marcelo, the book’s protagonist, a seventeen year-old boy challenged with Asperger Syndrome—a type of Autism characterized by an ineptitude in understanding social and emotional cues—while he works in the mail room of his father’s law firm for one summer. There, he must navigate the social waters made treacherous and, often, outright dangerous, by his disability, experiencing the pace and pressure of what his father calls the “real world.”

At its core, this book is about reading. But not in the traditional sense. Marcelo struggles with applying meaning to certain facial expressions, gestures, figurative language, and vocal pitch and tone. It has taken him years of observation and study to recognize when, for instance, someone is being sarcastic, or that someone being //fired//, as in from a job, should not be taken literally. Most of us take for granted the difficulties he faces because we recognize the shared literal and symbolic meanings of language and expression; one could say, we can //read// each other with little difficulty. What Marcelo’s story does, though, is illustrate for its readers how very important the skill of reading is; it depicts the necessity of reading as a survival skill. Because based on our assessments of people’s behaviors, both verbal and non-, we make decisions (sometimes important ones) and those decisions have consequences (sometimes dire ones).

Students would benefit, both as readers and as young men and women about to enter into the “real world,” themselves, by seeing the connection between the traditional idea of reading, that is, reading a text, and the more abstract idea that we read people, places, and situations. Misreading the tone in someone’s voice might have repercussions similar to forgetting a simple //not// in a text message to a friend; it can be the difference in knowing whether somebody is laughing or sobbing or both—sometimes it isn’t easy to tell, at first. Indeed, deciphering these messages, their meanings, and deciding how we react and respond to them only becomes more important the older and more involved within society we become. Marcelo’s story shows us how important they already are.