The Birthday Mystery

Author’s Note: This piece is a story analysis on the book Colin Fischer by: Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz.

Reading isn’t at the top of the list for most teens, but I think that if you find a good book, that you can transfer yourself to another world very easily. Many teenagers might enjoy this book because unlike reading about a boring school like our own, there are many different interesting events that occur at this school. In Colin Fischer by Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz, you get to live the life of a student with Aspergers and see what life is like from their point of view.

Asperger syndrome is often considered as a more intense version of autism. It can lead to difficulty interacting socially, repeated behaviors, and clumsiness. Can you even imagine what it would be like to have Aspergers in school? Miller and Stentz wrote this book about a high school student named Colin Fischer. Colin doesn’t like the color blue, can’t stand to be touched, and uses index cards to recognize facial expressions. It can’t be easy to deal with that at a public high school; his fears would be tested every day. So like most students, as it is for Colin, school was just a place he dreaded. That was until the daily routine changed and something exciting happened.

At Colin’s school, lunch time was just a time to eat and socialize with friends, until a gun went off one day during a birthday celebration for a classmate. What followed this incident was plenty of excitement and chaos. Every student and their parents had to attend a seminar after school about the shooting.You can probably relate to everyday being the same. So imagine something out of the ordinary happening. My school isn’t extremely interesting either, so reading about a school that did have something going on that doesn’t happen every day was entertaining.

I found this book very hard to put down, and I think that other teens would enjoy it too. It was interesting to read about what school would be like for someone with Aspergers . Though I would be fine without some of the events that happened in the book, it would be refreshing to have changes every now and then.