Why had I never heard of this book? Published in 2010, Out of My Mind was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years, and I just read it!
When I wrote about Moonrise a few weeks ago, I mentioned how children often ask me which the first book that made me cry was. I usually respond by telling them, instead, about the most recent book that made me cry – and now, it’s Sharon M. Draper’s Out of My Mind.
Eleven-year-old Melody Brooks is smart. She has a photographic memory and a delicious sense of humour. She loves her family, and her family loves her.
But she can’t show this part of herself to anyone, at least, not until she finds out about the Medi-Talker, a machine that can help her communicate. With cerebral palsy, she is confined to a wheelchair. She can make jerky movements at best, and easily loses control over her limbs. She drools, she cannot feed herself, and she cannot even go to the bathroom alone.
Out of My Mind is told from Melody’s point of view, and I loved everything about it. We see why she wants to screech and scream at her teachers. What would you do if people insisted on treating you like a baby and teaching you the alphabet over and over again when you’re 11 years old? Why can’t they see that she can understand much more than her ABCs? Why do people talk about her as if she is deaf and blind and cannot understand a thing? Just because she looks different and cannot express herself, people make assumptions about her, and it drives her mad!
We see her helplessness, her frustration and the worst of all – her hurt at being excluded. The ‘inclusion’ classes at school are a step forward, but her classmates don’t seem keen on including her.
I love Out of My Mind. We need stories like this, stories that pull us out of ignorance and help us understand a little more about people around us. Over and over again, I realise that inclusion is not just so that we see ourselves represented in literature; rather, we need to see that the ‘other’ is not the other and we need to take ourselves to task for it.
| Title | Out of My Mind |
| Author | Sharon M. Draper |
| Tags | Middle-Grade, Disability, Inclusion |
| Rating (out of 5) | 5 |
| Age-group | 9+ |
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