Plot Summary:
Cora has never found other people easy or enjoyed their company. Then she meets Adrien, the son of her brother’s employer at The Pomegranate institute, and their friendship grows. Cora is autistic and Adrien insists that they are alike. Adrien has ADHD and he is able to help Cora confront the difficulties she faces from other people and feel comfortable in herself. He is also her ticket into the mysterious Pomegranate Institute.
Cora becomes excited by the company’s goal of developing holograms that allow people to communicate with their dead relatives and heroes, but there are secrets about the company’s work that investigative Cora slowly begins to unpick. Can Cora fight to make her voice heard and keep hold of who she knows herself to be?
Review:
Last year, A Kind of Spark by Elle McNicoll offered autistic people a representation of themselves that didn’t shy away from experiences of intolerance and societal prejudice. This got all readers talking. It shook neurotypical readers and challenged them to notice what was happening to their neurodiverse friends. It was also a gripping contemporary novel about a girl who takes on her community. Show Us Who You Are is about something greater than taking on a village. It is about a girl who takes on the big bosses. The ones whose influence extends beyond a small village.
It is also about friendship, and how meeting the right people can give us the confidence to take on those who would hurt us. Adrien, with his care-free joy, is going to win fictional friend of the year in any just award. He refuses to be anybody other than who he is, something which gets him bother from neurotypical characters including his father who would rather he was something called ‘normal’ (which they equate to being like themselves). With support from his mother, Adrien learns to ignore this bother and as a result he thrives.
Cora is less confident in herself. It isn’t that anybody has ever said being autistic is a bad thing. It’s just that they act as if Cora can’t manage things she’s perfectly capable of doing. The story opens when her teacher denies her a place on the school paper because he believes she will struggle to work with others. He fails to imagine a society where all kinds of people need to adapt to working together. He fails to see that, in doing this, he is sending signals to the other children that they are more able and have the right to exclude Cora.
The Pomegranate Institute is a creepy smoke-and-mirrors setting. It is a Frankenstein’s Laboratory of the modern day where people push science to the limits without thinking of the cost. The story that emerges is so compelling that it kept me reading without pause until the very last pages.
Elle McNicoll is an exceptional talent and her books prove to anybody who doubted it – and doubt it they did – that neurodivergent people have stories and that they need to be heard.
Prepare to see this on bestseller lists. Prepare to see this nominated for awards. More than anything, prepare for the conversations this will provoke – conversations society has turned its head from for too long.
- Show Us Who You Are by Elle McNicoll is published on Thursday 4th March by Knights Of, and available to pre-order from all good bookshops. If you’d like to join her for the official launch event with Jen Campbell on 10thMarch, tickets are available at www.blackwells.co.uk/bookshops/events/.
