Posted by Tricia @ 5:59 am in Autism,Book Review
Tags: autism
How David Met Sarah – a very special love story
November 1, 2011
I haven’t written a lot of romantic fiction lately, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate a good old fashioned boy-meets-girl love story. When an old acquaintance from Momwriters approached me and asked if I’d be interested in reviewing How David Met Sarah, I said “sure – what’s it about?” I’m always up for a good read, and I’d been wanting to get pack to posting here anyway.
Then she told me: “it’s about a man with Down Syndrome who meets the girl of his dreams – a woman with autism.”
“How’s that going to work?” I thought. Two people, both with severe developmental delays, falling in love? That’s going to be complicated. What I wasn’t prepared for was how ordinary this story would be – it reminded me how alike we are, deep down inside, despite our differences.
David is a creature of habit. He eats his breakfast every day in the neighborhood diner, because he loves the people he sees there. And then one morning, his routine is knocked upside down when he sees a beautiful girl with long red hair eating with her mother. And like any other young man, he spends the next several weeks in a fog trying to figure out how to meet her, how to impress her, and how to have a relationship with her.
This love story is beautiful because it’s ordinary. It reminded me how similar my developmentally delayed kids are to “typical” kids – they have the same emotions, the same drive to experience life, just on a slightly different schedule.
Like David, Sarah is developmentally delayed. She has autism and does not speak. When David learns of her limitations, he resolves to learn sign language so he can communicate with her. I’ve seen this so many times with special needs kids – they recognize when they meet someone else like them, and simply shrug off the accommodations they must make to bridge the gaps between them.
I’m glad to have spent an hour reading this story, and I’ll save it for the next few years until my sons are older and start thinking about girls. How David Met Sarah is a wonderful story of courtship, written for and about two people who don’t quite fit with the rest of the world. This book may just help them understand the emotions they’ll experience.
How David Met Sarah 
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