Colin Fischer

Colin Fischer by Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz

Hardback, 256 pages

Published 7th Feb 2013 by Puffin Books

Shelves: arc-or-review, books-i-own, contemporary, cover-appeal, mental-health, read-in-2013, realistic-fiction, to-read, young-adult

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Description via Goodreads:

SOLVING CRIME, ONE FACIAL EXPRESSION AT A TIME

Colin Fischer cannot stand to be touched. He does not like the color blue. He needs index cards to recognize facial expressions.

But when a gun is found in the school cafeteria, interrupting a female classmate's birthday celebration, Colin is the only for the investigation. It's up to him to prove that Wayne Connelly, the school bully and Colin's frequent tormenter, didn't bring the gun to school. After all, Wayne didn't have didn't have frosting on his hands, and there was white chocolate frosting found on the grip of the smoking gun...Colin Fischer is a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, and his story--as told by the screenwriters of X-Men: First Class and Thor--is perfect for readers who have graduated from Encyclopedia Brown and who are ready to consider the greatest mystery of all: what other people are thinking and feeling.

The cover of Colin Fischer is the first thing that drew me to the book - I loved all the little hand drawn faces with the emotions written beneath them. After checking out the blurb, the cover started to make sense, making me want to pick this up and start reading straight away!

Needless to say, it didn't take me long to start this! I'm very interested in anything medical, psychological or mental-health related and the fact that this was a book that focused on Asperger's Syndrome was what made it really appeal to me. I have read a few other fictional books that focus on the subject, such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-time and Mockingbird, both of which I really loved. I'm certainly no expert on this subject and I have no experience of it, so I can't say whether this is an accurate portrayal of the syndrome, but I thought that it was portrayed in a reasonably fair manner. Colin's syndrome makes it difficult for him to interact with others and so social situations are particularly hard for him. One thing Colin is good at is logic - he is a very logical person and very intellectual, nobody could deny his intellect on a large variety of subjects.

When there is a gun shot heard in his the cafeteria of his school, Colin is the only one who stays and observes what happens - initially, he isn't fully aware of what went on around him, but he slowly pieces facts together, figuring out what happened at the school. I admit that I wasn't actually all that interested by the incident - for some reason, it just didn't grab my attention and I wasn't all that interested in the situation. The fact is, I didn't really care all that much about the people around Colin - most of them were pretty disrespectful towards Colin and just generally easy to dislike. I think that if I could connect with them as well as Colin, it may have been different. The 

I connected well with Colin and I felt for him - I didn't feel sorry for him at all - I just felt accepting, which was both an important and a great thing for the authors to achieve. I really enjoyed reading his notebook entries which I thought really gave us some insight to his true thoughts, it was something that allowed us to get into his head and see what he was thinking, even if Colin wasn't outwardly open with others. For me, Colin was thankfully the best feature of this book and I'm glad that the writing and portrayal of his character worked well for me.

Overall, this was an enjoyable book but the plot itself was lacking something. Colin's character is what redeemed this book and that was fine and understandable, seeing as he is the main focus of the book. However, the plot wasn't very interesting to me, it didn't work as well as similar plots have in other novels and didn't get me hooked. I would recommend this book just on the basis of Colin's character. I think that this will appeal to a lot of people, especially middle graders or younger young-adults.