Customer Reviews

Cinderella with Wrong Shoes: Poems by a young woman with autism

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This is a wonderful and easy to read collection of poems written by a young woman diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. It includes elegant observations about her life: the people she meets, nature and wildlife, growing pains, depression and illness. Highly recommended for readers who interact with people with autism.

I rarely find poetry that is easy to read. Most of it is convoluted in structure, or overly metaphorical. Not this book. Jennifer Fan's poetry reads like sentences, with pauses to call emphasis to certain phrases and images. She unobtrusively explains her metaphors, and discusses her own life and her observations of the world around her.

Among the topics she discusses are feeling different, wondering if she is sheltered, compassion toward animals, God, her close relationships to her mother and family, death, memories, fear about the future, depression, psychosis, American and Taiwanese cultures, and everyday life. There are too many topics to list. Her mother, Autumn Fan, adds a foreword and occasional brief comments after the poems.

The author quietly and unselfconsciously breaks the stereotypes of the uncaring, unfeeling autistic person, but her poetry is good in its own right. It makes everyday images seem unusual and important, which is what good art should do.

Some people will inevitably look at this book as an autism book, and try to dissect the writing for clues as to the nature of the autistic mind. This is what happens when autistic people write books. However, this is not an autism textbook, nor is it a classic memoir or a political book. It is primarily a book of good poetry, and it is enhanced for me by the fact that it is written by a member of my own (autistic) neurological culture.