Review of Upward Bound by Woody Brown

I felt that knowing the story of the nonspeaking author of this novel added significant depth and poignancy to this big-hearted, heartbreaking story of the clients and staff of an adult daycare center, their personal stories, and their inner lives.

In his debut novel, author Woody Brown, who is nonspeaking and autistic, shares a portrait of an adult daycare center in California through glimpses of its varied clients and staff members, their motivations, their frustrations, their hopes, and their divergent paths.

Upward Bound is a dreary building, but its daily clients bring gifts, abilities, and desires for connection. Its staff members have uneven abilities to recognize the humanity behind the clients' conditions and disabilities and to meet their emotional needs.

Brown slides the reader into various points of view, allowing us to sink into the inner lives of clients who may not be able to verbalize their thoughts and needs but who feel complex emotions and desires, as well as into staff members' varied backstories of how they came to Upward Bound. Some crucial disconnects between client intention and staff interpretation become clear to the reader; the characters' distress and frustration are powerful to understand. Yet some characters make undeniable, unlikely, essential connections with each other. Tragedy ultimately strikes in an unexpected way, and some figures drift apart.

Brown shares realistic challenges and disappointments within the novel, yet he also offers enlightening insights and hope for improved care and connection for his Upward Bound characters. He does this without smoothing the way too easily for discovering potential avenues to communication, which the author well knows can be a fraught, necessarily inventive and flexible, complex, time-consuming challenge.

The real-life story of the challenge of Brown's education, his extremely dedicated mother, and his labored yet highly effective method of communication is breathtaking and inspiring. (He points to letters on a laminated board and waits for his mother to confirm his words; this is how he conveys his thoughts and feelings and how he dictated the entirety of this novel, and this obviously requires his mother or another caregiver to spend hours working closely with him.) Brown's personal experiences lend legitimacy and particular poignancy to the protagonists' stories and paths in this big-hearted, sometimes heartbreaking novel.

I received a prepublication edition of Upward Bound courtesy of NetGalley and Random House.

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