How would you feel if you heard someone describe you like this: "A 'retard.' Not 'retard' like you might use the word to tease a friend who just said or did something stupid. I mean a real retard. Real in the same way that total means total. As in total retard: Everybody who knows me, everybody who sees me, everybody, anybody who even gets near me would tell you I'm dumb as a rock" (4)? What if someone said it to your face? How would you feel then? If you’re like Shawn McDaniel, who has been described in this way, you may get upset, but no one would ever know it.
Shawn McDaniel is the main character of Stuck in Neutral. He is a fourteen year old boy who is confined to a wheelchair with severe cerebral palsy. He can't function on his own, drools, uses the restroom on himself, etcetera. Everyone thinks he's mentally retarded, but he's not. He has cerebral palsy, but inside his head, he's intelligent, witty and sarcastic. He can remember everything he's ever heard or seen. He understands everything that happens around him although he's not in control of his body. Shawn also has seizures, which everyone around him thinks are painful and terrible, but Shawn has a type of out-of-body experience with each seizure. He can travel from his home in Seattle, Washington, to distant places and see and feel things he's never known before. Shawn's life may seem terrible to you, and sure, he'd like to not be stuck in a wheelchair being called names and never getting the girl, but his life is okay with him.
Stuck in Neutral is written from Shawn's point of view. The reader sees the story develop around Shawn. We see him living his life in the wheelchair and how, even though everyone thinks he's "a retard," we see that he's really not. Even his family treats him this way, especially his father. He doesn't believe that Shawn is living a happy life, which develops the theme of quality of life and how we determine it. Shawn seems to be moderately happy confined to his wheelchair. He's come to terms with it and accepts it, even though it's difficult to understand why. Since no one really knows how someone with severe cerebral palsy is feeling, the book is an interesting take on it, allowing the reader to see it from the mind of someone suffering with it (although we have no way of knowing if that's really how someone with CP feels). When Shawn's father decides that Shawn is suffering too much, that he's not living a happy life, the reader gets to decide if Shawn's father ends his suffering or if he has a change of heart.
Since there is not really any way of knowing how the mind of someone with cerebral palsy works, as in, we don't know if the person is intelligent and understands what we say, it is an interesting read. This really could be how it is. This is a definite strength of the book. A weakness of the book, however, is that I find it awkward. I think it may be because the author has a son like Shawn, which makes me think, Has he thought about killing his own child? and I don't want to think about that.
The CCBC (Cooperative Children's Book Center Choices, 2001) says, "Trueman's captivating first novel is hard to put down and has a delicious open ending. It will likely inspire lively discussion among teen readers of ethical issues such as euthanasia and quality of life." Kirkus Reviews (Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2000 (Vol. 68, No. 11)) says, "Though character is not the author's strongest concern here, ... Shawn will stay with readers, not for what he does, but for what he is and has made of himself."
To share this book with teens, it might also be a good idea to pair it with the companion novel Terry Trueman wrote in 2004 called Cruise Control that is from Shawn's brother's point of view. It would be interesting to read it and compare the two.
To close this review, I'd like to share a bit of Shawn's father's Pulitzer Prize-winning-poem that begins chapter nine on page 52.
Inside my chest
where my heart should be,
a ghost bird
is flying into a terrible wind,
a frozen winter wind,
and its eye is covered in ice,
and it has no voice,
and it is fading out of itself,
falling and falling.
Trueman, Terry. 2000. Stuck in Neutral. New York: Harper Collins. ISBN 9780030285180
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