An eye-opening read into the world of non-verbal autism. Should be on EVERYONE'S to-read list.

Very interesting. Nice insight into the world of autism that we don't see on a day to day basis.

I'm a fan of the first book in this series. I think that it's important to have books like this from the people with autism and other disabilities because they know better than anyone, even their caregivers and parents. So I jumped on this book when I saw that it was available for review and was coming to the U.S.

But first thing first, I wasn't a fan of the introduction. To me, it was the thing that I think is the opposite of this book - by someone who deals with autism in the family, but doesn't have. It would have been fine if it was about a quarter of the size smaller. David Mitchell took too much time to try and make this book his instead of Naoki's in my opinion. His 'introduction' was longer than most of the chapters in this book. I know that this book is important to family and caregivers to better understand their kids. But I think that this sort of crossed the line of not being informative but simply too long and drawn out.

It's important to remember that this book isn't just one book, but pieces of Naoki's other work that has been released in Japan put into one book. Personally, I think you can feel that. It all follows a similar theme but doesn't always match with the stories around it.

Sadly, I believe like the first one, my ADHD brain had a hard time grasping everything being said in the chapters, my brain would glaze over after a few hours when I got too tired. But I do believe that Naoki's writing was well done and elegant. I think his writing is also important to better understand him, but also anyone with any sort of disability. I do recommend it, though I do have to warn that it does repeat itself a bit, understandably. I think that was my downfall when reading it at night. Also know there is a story of fiction thrown in there without properly being labelled as such. I spent most of that story confused until I realized at the end that it wasn't something from his life like the other stories.