First published 2013
John Elder Robison never fit the mold as a child or as a father. Diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome at forty, he raised his son Cubby through logic puzzles and practical jokes. He told Cubby he bought him at the Kid Store with a faulty warranty. He read engineering manuals as bedtime stories. He warned that wizards turned misbehaving children to stone. But Robison got the important things right. He kept Cubby safe at his auto repair shop and gave him real adventures. By age ten, Cubby had steered Coast Guard vessels, operated freight trains, and crashed vintage cars into fences. When school officials labeled Cubby as slow and stubborn, Robison recognized the same treatment he had received. The question became whether Cubby also had Asperger's. By seventeen, Cubby had become a gifted chemist capable of creating military grade explosives. When federal agents arrived and Cubby faced sixty years in prison, both father and son had to examine their lives and accept being on the autism spectrum as both challenge and gift.
Genres: family-life, adventure, non-fiction, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unconventional-parenting
384 pages · Hardcover · Crown
Content warnings: child-abuse, mental-illness