Lord, Cynthia. Rules

Her best friend Melissa leaves for California for the summer, but Catherine has two new friends: the new girl next door, who is richer and pretty and one of those girls who you know is going to be popular, and Jason, a mute boy in a wheelchair she meets in the waiting room at her autistic brother's occupational therapy. He communicates by pointing at word cards in a book; Catherine decides he needs some new ones, like "awesome" and "whatever" and "stinks a big one." And so a friendship is born.

I started reading this because I never go to eat lunch by myself without a book, and I had a craving for a good sandwich. I finished half of it at lunch, then thought, "Okay, I guess I should get on with the rest of my day," then went out to the parking lot, thought I would read just to the end of the chapter, and finished the whole thing. It is very rare for realistic fiction to hit me with that much sheer unputdownableness, and I think it's all in the pacing--little scenes, meticulously detailed, with a lot of subtext, rather than the perfunctory summary scenes you often see in juvenile fiction to keep the page count down.

Catherine doesn't learn that Disabled People Are People Too, or anything as perfunctory as that... shes knows the obvious lessons, because she's been dealing with her brother for years. She's much more clueful than Jason's speech therapists, who insists on treating him like he's both deaf and stupid, when he's merely mute. She knows what she should do, and can't always find the strength to do it. She's trying to deal. And when I think on that for a while, it strikes me that the book is very carefully crafted around the idea of the gap between knowing what you should do and actually doing it, in the list of "rules" that Catherine keeps explaining to her brother David.

But you won't necessarily notice that the first time you read it. You'll just notice that it's good.