Agnese Spotorno's Aspy Girl: A Review

An adolescent girl talks to her shadow. At first she can't stand it, but over time, she learns to live with it and comes to understand, because of it, that "no one of us is the same as anyone else" and that each person is unique in their own way. This is the book Agnese Spotorno wrote to tell her own story: her family, school, scouts, Genoa, sports, the Corsican sea—and yes, the shadow of the autistic spectrum that amplifies every emotion ("I feel more than others do: it's like having giant ears, but on my heart") and leads to being judged with a certain frequency by a world that cannot grasp the depth of things. Page by page, we enter the author's universe (the volume includes Agnese's Glossary at the end), and we discover that she is now in high school and has achieved, despite her difficulties and quite possibly the skepticism of that "other world," remarkable things. Chief among them—as she notes—is understanding that her companion on this journey, this shadow, amounts to possessing a great treasure. Difference is richness.