I also really appreciated the way that Erskine portrays the people that Caitlin interacts with (Mockingbird is written in first person from Caitlin’s point of view).
I love the way the phrases Caitlin is told all the time are all capitalized, every time she uses them: “I Look At The Person” and “She doesn’t Get It.” You get a glimpse of the way her world looks – the things she hears over and over again from adults and the way she’s cataloged them away in her mind – without being beaten over the head with it.
But when she comes up with various plans of how to find closure, she keeps running into dead ends – her dad just cannot bear to face some of the realities of their new life. Devon even called Caitlin “Scout,” which was appropriate also because Devon was obsessed with the Boy Scout program and desperate to earn his Eagle.Ĭaitlin hears the word “closure” in one of the television stories about the shooting and becomes obsessed with finding it, hoping that her dad can find some too. Devon loved the movie and liked to compare their family to the family in the movie (Devon and Caitlin’s mother died a few years previously of cancer). The title of the book came from, as I’d expected before even opening it, To Kill a Mockingbird, which instantly endeared me to it, as TKAM is one of my all-time favorite books. Devon was the one who helped Caitlin function more normally, explained why people acted and reacted the way they did, and generally was just a terrific older brother to her (the kind you’d desperately hope you had if you had a child with special needs). mockingbird by kathryn erskineĬaitlin is ten years old and has Asperger’s syndrome, so she reacts differently to the death of her brother, Devon, then other people might. The author, Kathryn Erskine, lives in Virginia and in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, she wrote this book about a girl dealing with the death of her brother (although he was shot in a middle school, rather than at a college). And yet this book is impressively upbeat, without seeming forced.
Look, if you want to talk about a book that has a downer of a premise, it’s this one. I was far more impressed with this book than I expected to be. 9 of 10: Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine, about a girl with Asperger’s syndrome whose brother was recently killed in a school shooting, manages to be meaningful, appropriate, and even (surprisingly) funny.
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