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A review by emmanovella
Stim: An Autistic Anthology by Lizzie Huxley-Jones
3.0
I originally didn't rate this book, but after thinking on it, I'm now giving it 3 stars.
The pieces individually were good but I found it incredibly jarring to read (as you can see it took me over a month to get through. Usually I'd DNF but I wanted to support a book by autistic people) and to reiterate what I saw in another comment; I'm autistic and this book is by autistic writers.. yet they decided to jumble fiction, non-fiction and art, forcing me to switch my brain to different processing ways that was really confusing.
Anthologies can be hard for me regardless as I have to handle different writing styles, but typically the stories are all in the same genre or at least have some sort of connecting factor. For STIM, the connecting factor is autism, which is such a vast/broad subject that without having a more specific subject (say, non-fiction pieces where the writer talks about learning they were autistic, or discusses being autistic in high school etc) it makes for such a mismatched book that while may work for neurotypicals, isn't so great for a lot of autistic people who would perhaps be really excited by a book entirely by autistic creators.
I donated towards the creation of this book and I'm incredibly glad I did as I hope this book will help showcase these writers and hopefully see them published but I am disappointed overall that I couldn't enjoy this and often would skim through a piece because I couldn't get myself to switch
The pieces individually were good but I found it incredibly jarring to read (as you can see it took me over a month to get through. Usually I'd DNF but I wanted to support a book by autistic people) and to reiterate what I saw in another comment; I'm autistic and this book is by autistic writers.. yet they decided to jumble fiction, non-fiction and art, forcing me to switch my brain to different processing ways that was really confusing.
Anthologies can be hard for me regardless as I have to handle different writing styles, but typically the stories are all in the same genre or at least have some sort of connecting factor. For STIM, the connecting factor is autism, which is such a vast/broad subject that without having a more specific subject (say, non-fiction pieces where the writer talks about learning they were autistic, or discusses being autistic in high school etc) it makes for such a mismatched book that while may work for neurotypicals, isn't so great for a lot of autistic people who would perhaps be really excited by a book entirely by autistic creators.
I donated towards the creation of this book and I'm incredibly glad I did as I hope this book will help showcase these writers and hopefully see them published but I am disappointed overall that I couldn't enjoy this and often would skim through a piece because I couldn't get myself to switch