First Book Club Meeting

Our book club is reading Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine.  Mocking bird is book written from the perspective of a ten year old girl named Caitlin that has Asperger's  Caitlin lives with her dad, her mom died of cancer and her brother was killed during a school shooting.  She is in the fifth grade and works closely with a social worker named Mrs. Brook who works with Caitlin on understanding other people's feelings and expressing her own.  Caitlin struggles to develop relationships with people and doesn't really have an interest in making friends, despite the encouragement from Mrs. Brook.  She finds comfort in her dictionary and would much rather read her dictionary to learn the concrete meanings of words than engage in social activities with her peers which requires more abstract interpretation of emotions and social cues, which she doesn't understand.  Caitlin also has tantrum rage meltdowns (TRM), which usually happen when she is overwhelmed or anxious and can't express her feelings or otherwise effectively calm herself down.  She also sucks on her sleeve when she is anxious or uncomfortable.  The first chapters also describe what Caitlin calls 'stuffed animaling', which is when she focuses on something until the colors blur together and she forgets where she is and pretends she is somewhere she feels safe.    

For our first meeting we decided to read the first ten chapters.  We met in person after class and discussed what we had read so far.  We talked about how we think that the author is doing a good job of portraying Asperger's syndrome through Caitlin.  Many of her characteristics are very typical of individuals on the Autism Spectrum and the story being told from her perspective does a good job of portraying the common thought process and difficulty understanding social and emotional expression of individuals on the spectrum.  We also talked about wether or not Caitlin fully understood that her brother passed away and was not coming back because she talks about him in the present as if he was still there.  We concluded our meeting by agreeing to read the next ten chapters before we met again.