Luke is what you would call my only friend. When we were little kids our favourite game was pirates and that’s when I started calling him ‘Legless, because that’s definitely a pirate name, and he called me ‘Ahoy there, Marty’. Well, he didn’t call me ‘Ahoy there’ but ‘Marty’ with the ‘Ahoy there’ first, get it? Just like pirates, or how we thought pirates would talk. Sometimes he’d say, ‘Ahoy there, Mixed-up Marty!’ Mixed-up Marty, that’s me all right, and Luke is Luke with only one-and-a-half legs.
Marty has a lot on his plate. His mother is leaving home to fly around the world for three months. This leaves his dad in charge and he thinks Marty is a loser. He’s also just started an Enterprise group with his bestfriend Luke, and three others, which with all the in-fighting and crocheting doesn’t leave much time for his overdue homework. On top of all that Marty is autistic; he finds faces hard to work out and he doesn’t like to be touched. How will this help him get to first base with Francesca? How will get on without his Mum? Will the Enterprise group ever got on long enough to make a decision?
A moving and sometimes funny book about an Autistic teen boy navigating adolescence and making sense of the world through his mixed up mind. Author Deborah Burnside checked out the Young Enterprise Scheme at her local high school while researching for the book. While dwelving into the mind of an autistic teen boy she discovered that her own son had similar problems (and as Deborah emphasises – it’s not about her own son). Highly recommended for 11-15 year olds.
Deborah Burnside lives in Taradale and is the mother of three sons. Her first novel On a Good Day was shortlisted for the 2005 LIANZA Awards and was a Storylines Notable Young Adult Fiction Book the same year. Her first junior novel Night Hunting was a 2009 Storylines Notable Junior Fiction Book. Her children’s non-fiction book It’s True: This Book is a Load of Rubbish was part of the popular ‘It’s True’ series in Australia.
RRP $22.99 ISBN: 9781869509255
Reviewed by Maria Gill
